Christina Wodtke
675 Kendall Ave
Palo Alto, CA
415-577-2550/650-858-1844
Christina at eleganthack.com
Professional Experience
- Cucina Media
July 2005 to present
Cofounder / President / Principal Instigator
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Cofounded webware company dedicated to collaborative publishing with developer Lars Pind. First product is PublicSquare, a publishing platform for groups of passionate amateur publishers who want to make a living doing what they love. Premier design magazine Boxes and Arrows (founded by me also) has been running on Public Square since February 2006.
Responsibilities: it's a startup. I've done everything except code, and sometimes that too. Some items on the laundry list are: Information architecture, interaction design, managing volunteer labor, marketing and sales, interface design, market sizing, product roadmapping, and that was just yesterday...
- Management Innovation Group
August 2004 to January 2006
Founding Partner
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Helped companies (including Rodale and the New York Times) understand how to better take advantage of emerging technology and design trends; organized creative teams for greater productivity and innovation; and envisioned breakthrough businesses and product lines that meshed customer desire with company need.
Work included product line planning, team dis-disfunctionalization, personal coaching, and sometimes creative direction and design advice.
- Yahoo! Inc
July 2002 to July 2004
Design Director, Search and Marketplace Group
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Managed User Experience Design Group (30 people) for the Search and Marketplace Division of Yahoo Inc.
User Experience Design includes User Research, Interaction Design, Visual Design and Web Development (Client-side coding).
Search and Marketplace consists of Web Search, Shopping, Maps, Yellow Pages, Travel and Autos (plus assorted smaller properties)
Responsibilities include resource allocation, hiring, budgets and schedules, providing creative direction to visual and interaction design, determining direction for research planning with user researchers, and forming a front-end code strategy with web development. Patterner with senior management to develop product design strategy to realize business goals. Evangelized user experience out, and product needs in to better bridge user and business goals.
Key accomplishments include the redesign and launch of the new Yahoo! Search, a critical element of the re-positioning of Yahoo! as a major search player and the redesign of Yahoo! Shopping, which reinvented it from a shopping mall model to a comprehensive search and compare site.
Carbon IQ
December 2000 to July 2002
Partner
- Practicing user experience
designer and managing partner. User-centered design processes included interaction
design, information architecture, user research, usability testing, heuristic
analysis and related methodologies
such as persona creation, scenarios, participatory design and cognitive
modeling. As partner, activities including project management, team formation
and managing (including interviewing and selecting freelancers and vendors,
negotiating contracts, timetables and budgets) client relation management
and evangelism, publicity, marketing, as well as public speaking and writing
(see below). Clients included Shockwave, McDougal Littell, Sprite and Wells Fargo.
- Hot Studio
June 2000 to December 2000
Sr. Information Architect
- Acted as lead architect on projects. Determined the structure and user
experience of a project by translating client business requirements and
user needs into functional requirements for large, complex web-based projects.
Responsibilities included defining site functionality, navigation, and interaction,
as well as analyzing user tasks and creating scenarios, developing personas,
analyzing business requirements and researching competitive analysis/best
practices. Client contact for architecture issues; managed writing and usability
testing resources. Clients included Snapfish, Return Path and Schwab.
The Egreetings Network
July 99 to April 2000
Information Architect/Manager- Responsible for overall site flow, as well as interaction design for new
projects. Created interface and interaction designs. With merchandising
team, responsible for product categorization and labeling. Applied usability
testing learnings to site to refine interface design, and identified new
areas for study. Ran discount
usability tests. Designed interaction for re-architecture of site with
emphasis on personalization and customization based on user state. Developed
wireframes and blueprints for re-architecture, along with interaction designer.
Managed a team of 6 usecase analysts and interaction designers.
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March 99 to July 99
Senior Client Side Developer/Manager
- Working manager responsible for writing and repairing html, and modifying
it to work with Egreetings' proprietary cgi system. Recruited and managed
a team of html writers. Represented department's interests on projects dealing
with new products and services on the website, as well as being a principal
in building these projects.
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- September 98 to March 99
Junior Webmistress
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Created, cleaned up and altered html to work with CGI's, organized weekly
pushes, researched emerging technologies for use in interface. Project
management.
- December 97 to September 98
Content Management and merchandising
- Included maintaining the digital greeting database, q.a., categorization
and labeling of cards and their hierarchies, marketing copy writing, html,
altering fonts for postcard use with fontographer, designing reports on
postcard performance, and more.
- Snap! Online
April 97 to October 97
Website Reviewer
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Responsible for reviewing more than 3600 Web sites for C|Net's award
winning portal.
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Professional Memberships
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The Institute for Information Architecture Founded in 2002 with Lou Rosenfeld, currently 1200 members worldwide. Served as President in founding year.
American Society of Information Science Planning committee
of IA Summit 2002, Chair of IA Summit 2003.
San Francisco Women on the Web a.k.a. sfWOW. Founding
member
Press & Publications
Author of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web
for New Riders Publishing. Released October 2002.
Founder and Publisher, Boxes and Arrows,
an online magazine devoted to promoting the emerging fields of information
architecture and interaction design.
Articles
A baker's dozen in Boxes and Arrows, including the popular The Elements of Style for Designers
Quoted in WSJ article on Presidential Daily Brief design.
The Face of Information
Architecture An interview on WebWord.
Article for SitePoint. Seven key deliverables for Information Architects
What's in a Name
In which IA's from Richard Saul Wurman to Clemet Mok discuss the nature
of being an IA.
The war with design, fine art and IA, and IA communities
Article for SitePoint. A simple, colloquial explanation
of IA, in the quirky eleganthack style.
- Presentations & Workshops
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Managing Up: Preconference workshop at 2005 IA Summit
Multiple presentations of The Future of IA in Sweden, Norway and Denmark in 2004.
Make It Bigger in 2004 on strategic user research at the MSU Usability Conference
User Interface 8 2003: Information Architecture: Blueprints from the Web and Great Design through People Skills
Chaired the 2003 IA Summit. Closing remarks(ppt).
Macromedia Usability Summit 2002: User-Centered
Design Strategies
CHI-FOO 2002
Point / Counterpoint: What’s the big IA?
BAY-CHI 2002 Methods
for Information Architecture
ASIS&T IA Summit 2002: Information
Architecture and Usability
Seybold San Francisco 2001: Putting
the 'Eye' in Interface: Effective and Beautiful Interface Design
Seybold San Francisco 2001: Beyond
Bread Crumbs: Best Practices and Tactics In Information Architecture
Web Design World 2001: User-Centered
Design Strategies
ASIS&T IA Summit 2001: What
Do You "DO" All Day?
Website Construction Workshops for
sfWOW in 1999. Taught 10 workshops on the basics of website building,
including html, CSS, ftp and architecture, cross platform issues and more.
- I also founded the Information
Architecture Cocktail Hour in San Francisco, that has been blessed
with a host of successors.
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Education
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BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute
References available upon request