John Schussler Email & Phone Number

Seattle, WA, US

"And now, for something completely different..."

Richfield, Minnesota, US

Contributed as a founding member of the Seattle office (2nd person hired out of what is now a >200 person office), leading the successful launch of new mobile apps (Geek Squad, Best Buy Home), NLP/NLU services ("Blue Assist" chatbot), and customer support (Best Buy Help) to reduce support costs and increase customer retention.

Seattle, WA, US

Grew an online customer support team from 9 to 22 that successfully delivered $5M-$7M in annual ROI for 138 mobile and desktop customer support portals across 10 brands (including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Hotwire).

Seattle, WA, US

Identified market opportunities, defined strategy, and led cross-functional team to successful launch of new RealPlayer products. Assumed responsibilities of Unifi Product VP after his departure to manage v1 carrier launch, v2 design.

Seattle, WA, US

Led PM, UX design, and UserEd teams for RealPlayer, assisting VP with product management, market positioning, and competitive analysis.

Seattle, WA, US

Led design team to simplify the RealPlayer user experience, using usability tests to ensure we exceeded customer expectations.

Redmond, Washington, US

Briefly rebounded to MSFT after Pure Networks move to Cisco, but then remembered why I left in the first place. Worked on Windows Vista networking which, like all things Vista, was not all that you might have hoped for.

San Jose, CA, US

Drove design and usability teams of a small startup (later purchased by Cisco) to significantly improve usability of the product. Identified critical problems in the previous design and drove implementation of solutions that resulted in ~50% drop in customer support calls concerning issue areas. Contributed design and usability solutions to OEM partner.

Redmond, Washington, US

Designed and drove production of user interface for Media Center Extender devices. Drove the initial design of Portable Media Center (later called Zune) version 1 concurrently with the design work on Smart Display version 2. Managed external design firm and internal design resources from early product concept stages (both hardware and software) through to.

Redmond, Washington, US

Designed and drove production of user interface for Smart Display devices. Managed the design, userEd, and usability teams, as well as coordinating internal MS stakeholders, successfully marshaling all these groups to produce a product that, even though introducing a new product category, was intuitive and easy to use.

Redmond, Washington, US

Led design and drove production of Start menu, Desktop, and related UI components for Microsoft Windows XP, with usability tests showing dramatic improvement in ease of use: the overall task success rate for my features was nearly double that of the same features in Windows 2000 and Windows 98

Redmond, Washington, US

Ah, the roaring 90's. My "graduate degree" in software design from the school of MSFT and hard knocks. I did all kinds of stuff: tested fonts, wrote help files, did interactive help systems for CD-ROMs (those shiny disc things, for all you young'uns), created "social interface" characters (cousins of Microsoft Bob and the infamous Clippy), created the MC24.