Chris Gielow

I helped build the largest UX team in southern California, staffing a team and designing a beautiful new studio in LaJolla. What began as a push towards design excellence ended with a tripling of shareholder value, and subsequent acquisition of ACTIVE by a private investment group for $1BN.

Throughout, I've helped transform our useful services into usable and desirable products. Today our designs are touching millions of lives every day with improved experiences, reduced support costs and optimized conversion rates for products including Reserve America, RegOnline, ActiveNet, Active.com, StarCite and Wingate Web.

I am most proud of conceiving of, and designing WannaDo.com, a revolutionary service that connects people with the things they want to do. This directly resulted in our 30th rank on the InformationWeek 500.

Notable:

• Hired over 20 Interaction Designers across five global studios. Designed the LaJolla HQ.
• Established a Vision and Mission for User Experience at ACTIVE.
• Created a proprietary UX Scorecard system with 7 KPI's.
• Introduced Rapid Prototyping as a design tool, and lightweight Agile deliverable.
• Planned and executed our first Contextual Design process to define a new offering.
• Conceived of, and designed Wannado.com.
• Created a Conversion Optimization reference design, used by core products.
• Assisted in the creation of a B2B style-guide and component library.
• Lectured at UCSD School of Cognitive Psychology, and ACTIVE World conference.
• Organized and ran a week long UX Workshop for over twenty stakeholders.
• Completed two Triathlons and a Century thanks to support from ACTIVE

Moderate the worlds largest community of industrial designers, with over 8000 registered users.

I was recruited to Alaris Medical Systems to lead a new Concept Development team, replacing agency-reliance on IDEO and Cooper. Through subsequent acquisitions and spinoffs I was made Director of User Experience at CareFusion, and led the design of next-generation Infusion and Medication Management systems.

I built a small staff and created a strategic relationship with Ziba design for global Design Research and Industrial Design support.

I authored their Phase 1 Global Development Process, which emphasized workflow-analysis, FMEA and usability, ensuring the upmost safety and efficiency while passing the scrutiny of regularly agencies.

I was invited to join Motorola in their heyday of design as a founding member of the MOTOCITY studio. Under Design Directors Tim Parsey and Jim Wicks, I developed numerous user-centric technology innovations and served as the Application Lead for the MotoTech segment, and secondary and peripheral interfaces for Chameleon, Motorola’s Next-Generation Mobile UI. In July 2003 I was awarded special companywide recognition as a “Think Tank Innovator.”

I conceptualized, developed and implemented innovative technology solutions for clients of this innovative startup within Publicis “where technology meets marketing.”

Pioneering work around Narrowcasting Digital Signage here has me featured in the USA Today, the Chicago Tribune and AdWeek. As the Design Director I supervised and managed one subordinate.

In this position I served as a design consultant to clients of the firm, innovating many techniques and processes as well as pioneering an interaction-design department.

Contributed to winning a Gold Medical Device Excellence Award (MDEA) in 2005 and an IDSA/BusinessWeek IDEA award in 2002.

Brooks Stevens is one of the founding fathers of Industrial Design in the 1930’s. I studied under Brooks, and later joined his practice, working on many of the firm’s long-time assignments. I helped usher in the next-generation of methods including computer-aided design (Alias), rapid-prototyping and interaction design.

I designed products for Chrysler, Briggs & Stratton, GE Medical, Rockwell, Evenflo, Polaris and more.