Robert Fay's Resume (Last updated October 24th 2008)

Desire a strategic position that draws on information management and user experience expertise, offering opportunities for professional growth and responsibility.

Rob Fay has over ten years of information management experience, supporting a variety of public (federal, state) and private information systems (client/server and web-based) and system development efforts. His varied educational and work activities and interests have made him a staunch advocate for the user experience. He is currently applying his expertise to the e-learning market, focusing on defining and designing internal and customer-facing systems to enable innovative learning.

Mr. Fay is interested in new technologies and advocates information as a resource (to be valued equally with financial, human, and physical resources). He has expertise in and a passion for user experience topics including information architecture, interaction design, social media, information management, and usability.

Responsible for being the user advocate and effectively communicating product design needs. Maintains a cross-product knowledge base and independently identifies and prioritizes gaps in the user experience and proposes solutions for improvement. Designs and prototypes solutions for demonstrating a particular user experience. Creator and curator of Blackboard's Design Framework, or pattern library, of user interface metaphors and design components. Maintains knowledge base of current usability research, theories and methodologies (especially user-centered design processes) and industry best-practices. Explores user concerns to discover needs and priority, using both formal and informal user research and interface evaluation techniques, including creating internal program for usability testing and web analytics. Advances Blackboard's business and technical strategy to meet client needs.

Defined the vision and designed experiences via a user-centered process that includes the research and development of goal and task models, usage scenarios and patterns, metadata requirements and elegant solutions for interaction, navigation, and labeling. Additionally, played a critical role in crafting broader interaction models between K12's digital products, K12's internal staff (including instructional designers), teachers and principals of its schools, and-most importantly, the students.

Employed a user-centered methodology to create functional vision and documented artifacts to meet the needs of both product users and developers. In addition, designed product functionality, navigation flows, site architecture plans, wireframes, user interface design, and functional specifications for the presentation layer.

Provided information architecture support by facilitating a heuristic evaluation of the National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases (NIH NIDDK) web redesign effort(MS SharePoint), including making design recommendations based on web analytics, creating personas, and conducting a competitive analysis. Conducted beta testing of the Institute's web-based scientific coding system (SIMON). Leveraged the National Institute of Health's (NIH) grants system and NIDDK's internal scientific classification system for reporting on scientific topics, and worked with the budget office to develop search strategies, classification schemes and methodologies to support the accurate reporting of scientific and budgetary data for the NIDDK.

Led a working group to assess needs and review potential grants management system alternatives. Led requirements analysis and beta testing of the University's web-based human subjects protocol approval system.

Worked closely with NIH NIDDK end users and developers to foster the maintenance of NIH applications and participated in working groups to ensure greater usability of customized computer applications. Provided program coordination, technical consulting, and acted as a liaison between the NIDDK divisions and among the NIH community.

Worked with the NIH e-gov team as the lead user support analyst. Responsible for staff management, customer support, training, documentation, reporting, policy, and design and implementation of help desk tracking system and associated knowledge bases. Supported the NIH IMPACII and eRA Commons set of electronic grants management systems. Received the NIH ADP/EP Certificate of Appreciationfor "Exceptional High Quality User Support Services to the NIH Extramural Community" in June 2001.

Prepared, managed, and maintained computerized data-collection protocols and participated in the management and collection of health research survey data. Researched and collected analytical data for federal and state contracts using a variety of survey research methods, including telephone and face-to-face surveys.