Rob Watson Email & Phone Number

Ashburn, VA, US

Reston, Virginia, US

Ashburn, Virginia, US

• Helping a highly successful professional services organization become equally successful at developing digital solutions that enable self-employed professionals to focus on their work and their clients, instead of on.
• Responsible for establishing design process, recruiting/hiring designers and researchers, and leading day-to-day design activities for multiple web and mobile apps and internal CRM tools.
• Established core design system to create a consistent holistic experience across disparate sites and web apps, and to bring “product” in line with corporate rebranding
• Providing management and coaching for both internal designers and external resources
• Oversaw a complete visual redesign of MBO’s corporate web site and the MBO “marketplace”
• Leading UX strategy and design to revamp the on-boarding process for talent working with MBO’s enterprise clients

Washington, DC, US

• As the Director of User Experience at The Chronicle of Higher Education, I was hired to establish a UX practice, and to help the company make the transition to publishing in a digital world. I’m responsible for the.
• Established user experience as a practice, building and managing a team of UX designers and user researchers internally, and managing external vendors for design and research
• Institutionalized user research and user testing as a standard part of the product design process
• Led The Chronicle's first user-ecology study, focusing on how professionals in higher education manage their careers and find jobs, and how institutions find and hire faculty and administrators
• Led interaction and visual design of ChronicleVitae, a professional network tailored specifically to the field of higher education, in a lean startup process through ideation, product definition, design, and.
• Provided vision and direction for all major online initiatives at The Chronicle, including: the transition from static to responsive websites; a complete re-imagining and relaunch of The Chronicle of Philanthropy; and.

Global, US

• Served as business lead throughout a multi-year technology transformation effort for an airline-owned company focused on re-writing a suite of mainframe-based legacy applications onto a distributed J2EE platform.
• Led business and technical analysts in requirements elicitation and definition and business process modeling
• Worked as a counterpoint to the client’s business leads, assisting in the management of the business team, and serving as a primary point of contact in support of the architecture, development and testing teams.
• Worked with the PMO to provide facilitation, planning and scheduling for cross-functional requirements definition and review
• Defined best practices in the development of use cases and requirements management
• Developed guidelines for managing/maintaining the projects numerous requirements artifacts, and processes for requirement-related issues tracking and change controlAdditionally, provided UX strategy and design as part.

New York, NY, US

• Served as lead analyst in AOL Business Technologies’ (BT) Design Center to ensure that business needs were clearly understood by project teams, to lay out high-level, end-to-end solution design across disparate.
• Led requirements elicitation/review and solution design for aprox 150 projects in 2005-06, encompassing 800,000 hours of design & development
• Developed BT’s first Conceptual Solution Document, laying out high-level, end-to-end design approach across multiple systems, as guidance for project teams; owned and maintained the CSD template
• Facilitated JAD sessions
• Participated on BT’s Architecture Review Board
• Provided leadership to AOL’s “next generation” SDLC definition process, including leading BT’s “Tiger Team” to redefine the Technical Requirements Document, and an “Iterative Working Group” to create recommendations.

New York, NY, US

• Worked with business owners and developers to define the interactive user experience of various AOL support features online, and applications used by Call Center Consultants providing registration, billing and.
• Developed screen layout wireframes and screen flows/navigation maps
• Conducted usability testing and focus groups
• Created prototypes for testing in html and Director
• Managed and coached junior UI Designers

US

• Designed and developed Multimedia and Web applications in Director, Flash and html
• Developed information architecture structure for client sites and contributed to content development

• Responsible for design, oversight and execution of Multimedia, Internet, and Video products
• Supervised designers, artists, and developers
• Performed client interfacing, content development and project management
• Developed two- and three-dimensional illustrations and animations and digital audio/video products

Provided special effects design and execution, mixed-media design rendering, sculpting,moldmaking, and airbrush painting for art departments which received four Academy Awards, and an Emmy

Masters Program, Theatre Arts

Ba, Theatre Arts