Cultivate and refine effective user research and evaluation practices in a lean UX agile software development environment within the Rational Design Factory.

-- Led ethnographic activities in support of an oncology diagnosis and treatment demo that resulted in the discovery of and the agreement upon candidate roles Watson technology could play in the treatment of a patient. The demo formed the basis of Watson's first oncology product.-- Identified barriers to adoption and evaluated potential solutions to improve likelihood of acceptance of new products for healthcare and consumers by directing user walkthroughs and conducting testing.-- Co-authored User Experience paper for IBM Academy of Technology top 10 technology themes (in progress).

-- Enabled IBM products to go to market on ibm.com in a period of months by repurposing prior user research to develop a content model, leading research to validate and improve the model, and leading the design and evaluation of an entirely new commerce experience. -- Enabled customers to find information more easily on ibm.com by leading research for strategic search improvements that informed the strategic ibm.com search experience.-- Co-led research subteam for Academy of Technology study on innovation, which found that innovation is best served by removing barriers to innovation within organizations.-- Guided the global task-based navigation to cover all families of user goals discovered while leading the development of an integrated cross-company view of user research artifacts, enabling design teams to understand the purpose and value of ibm.com from various users' perspectives.

Puente Resource Center serves the rural population of the South Coast of San Mateo county. Rob has volunteered for Puente since its earliest days, and has gone on to be a Director on the Board and past Board Chair. As a volunteer, Rob has taught English as a Second Language, supported outreach work at local ranches, tutored multiple people to help them successfully become US Citizens, and prepared federal and state taxes as a VITA volunteer, returning thousands of dollars in refunds to local community members.

-- Made it easier for small businesses to establish an internet presence by leading user research to evaluate and improve the way a network appliance product supported key configuration tasks.-- Guided the development team to implement more usable products by creating and maintaining design specifications.

-- Enabled IBM to receive $4B in hardware revenue in a 3 year period by designing, prototyping and user testing a robust commerce experience for IBM Business Partners.-- Enabled a client to establish themselves as industry leaders by designing, prototyping and testing a first of a kind global container shipment status web application.-- Helped the IBM Consulting Group establish the Usability Engineering practice, by being one of the first practitioners in the then new practice, demonstrating the value and viability of an external usability consulting practice.

Helped design teams across IBM understand their customers' requirements more quickly and accurately by developing and teaching UX professionals to use tools and methods to analyze customer tasks and requirements collected in electronic group meetings.

-- Increased the productivity of IBM sales and administrative staff by serving as a lead practitioner in 2 newly established usability labs (Bethesda, then Palo Alto), identifying and avoiding hundreds of problems across applications. -- Increased the ability of the organization to deliver usable applications by teaching colleagues about user-centered design, including less experienced staff and the development organization.-- Improved consistency and optimized processes among new usability groups by creating standardized work products and processes for teams, enabling other usability labs to come online faster and to improve consistency of the usability message across Information Systems Group Teams.

-- Improved communication between hearing and hearing-impaired telephone users by designing, prototyping, and testing a product concept that ultimately became a product and that was featured in IBM Equal Opportunity materials.-- Established usability testing as a useful part of the product development process at the La Gaude lab by leading the design an execution of the first usability testing performed at the lab.