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Introduction

Dane Howard is a Senior Creative and strategist specializing in the practice of prototyping and product development. Dane's strengths are creating strong strategic design directions that shape businesses and their products and fostering the teams that build them. He has been instrumental in designing prototypes and frameworks for over 10 years. With a background in sequential media, he has focused much of his work on the creative process. Experience-based prototypes and serial thinking are the emphasis of his work.

Dane has worked on an international scale with Directors of Design, Marketing and R&D labs, Senior Executives of Technology and Chief Executive Officers. He has played a principle design and management role in developing key strategies for Microsoft, Designworks | BMW, Major League Baseball, Avaya Communications, Scient Corporation, Quokka Sports, NBCOlympics, Rolling Stone, Pulse Entertainment, Alias/Wavefront and Disney. His work & travels have brought him experience in working both in Europe & Asia.

Dane is also an accomplished speaker, artist and author.

Experience

Microsoft Corporation - (October 2001 - Present)

UX Design Lead, Mobile & Embedded Devices (MED) (Jan. 2005 - Present)
Microsoft Mobile Division, Redmond, WA

Mobile Division, Team leader for 'Connected' Experiences & Media.

Initial Customer Experience (ICE) - Dane was responsible for taking the global customer research for mobile handsets and turning it into a User Experience strategy, including prototypes, taxonomy and demonstrations representing a series of key investments proposed division wide. The goal of the work was to illustrate how an experience-based design & focus would improve customer satisfaction across the customer journey for Windows Mobile Devices. The work has been

Led Cross-division collaboration and evangelism of ICE leading to exposure in a division wide all-hands presentation, including the global presence of 1700 colleagues worldwide. The ICE initiative has since affected the workflow & approach for hundreds of colleagues working across the division.

Led Interactive prototyping team for the future of PC connect experiences, working with the Windows Longhorn, Media Center & Xbox division to evangelize a user-experience vision & cross collaborative work for better together thinking with a PC / mobile device.

Led Applications discovery initiative & prototypes ranging from initial concept to C# shell code implementation simulations. Led the cross division evangelism & thinking on how applications are discovered and accessed on Windows Mobile devices.

• Inventor, 1 Patent Pending

Media - Promoted to Pod leader for MED User Experience group for Media design & development. Asked to build a small team to help plan, design, and execute against the Media experiences needed to compliment Future Windows Mobile Platform releases including:

-- Photo capture experience on Mobile phones: Responsible for the future design user interface for photo capture & sharing

-- Media playback & sync experience for future releases

Special Projects - Dane's team has been asked on numerous occasions to lead virtual teams to design & execute against special strategic projects for the Mobile division, collaborating across division and across the company. Some of these projects include:

-- MSN -- Integration with MSN mobile scenarios & future vision release, including: Mobile Search, Instant Messaging, Real-time Presence, Photo Blogging and Glance-able services

-- Xbox 360 -- Special collaboration projects with Xbox 360.

-- Package design & Out-of-box experience

-- User Assistance - Designed an interactive 'Quick-start' guide for Windows Mobile devices to help customers with initial setup with their devices.

 

Design Manager, Smart Personal Objects Technology ( SPOT ) (October 2001 - Jan 2005)
Microsoft Research, WA

As the Design Manager, Dane built and led a cross-disciplinary team of designers responsible to direct user experiences for a new set of mobile Microsoft Products. As a steward for design, Dane was asked on many occasions to present product designs & strategies to the Chairman of Microsoft and numerous senior vice Presidents. His design team serviced the entire business of SPOT including product development, marketing, and business development. The product design team & experience required expertise & management of relationships in Europe, China and Japan. Dane was responsible to help influence international partners & collaborators internationally across a multi-disciplinary team. Dane led a cross disciplinary design team including:

-- Industrial Design - Dane's team led product development & user research development for mechanical & industrial design prototypes for a number of mobile devices, including watches.

-- User Interface design - Over three years, Dane built a team to design, prototype & launch an innovative user interface team for mobility & small devices. The resulting work led to a number exposure inside and outside the company on the topic of Glance-ability and pioneered a number of white-papers on glance-able initiatives within the company.

-- Web development design - As a product development and service business, SPOT design needed to respond to the needs of the business in web development and services design. Dane led a team to design and launch a new MSN service for mobile devices call 'MSN Direct.'

- New Opportunities / Business Development - Dane led an incubation design team that built a portfolio of opportunities over an 8 month period. Dane collaborated with an internal business development team on specific Design-wins built to extend a series of opportunities for the business. The team was strategically built for experience design. In 8 months, the team successfully discovered over 12 new applications & opportunities for the SPOT technology.

While at SPOT:

Setting the Vision: As a rare product development opportunity within Microsoft, SPOT was incubated inside of Microsoft Research. As a founding member of the group, Dane helped grow the group from 7 people to 60 in the course of 3 years. The group was incubated out of Research and delivered two successive years of product launches, services and a nationwide wireless network. The group acquired 3 key OEM partners, of which Dane helped influence with the User Experience design vision.

In January, 2003 Dane's team was responsible for designing a visionary video that was premiered at the CES Keynote in Las Vegas by the Microsoft chairman. The piece received numerous accolades both inside and outside the company for its vision. In January 2004, the team delivered on that vision by announcing available product. The product was awarded 'product of the year' for the Consumer Electronic Show.

In January 2005, Dane's design team presented a next generation reference design of a wireless watch. The 9 month collaboration enumerated on a series of mechanical & aesthetic improvements that were deemed impossible for such a watch. Dane managed the project with internal Hardware team & external vendors in 3 continents and four languages. The finished reference design produced over 12 patent filings.

Patent filings: Over the 3 years at SPOT, Dane was inventor or co-inventor for over a dozen patent filings.

- Inventor, 8 Patents pending in User interface & software architecture

- Inventor, 4 Patents pending in Mechanical & Industrial Design solutions.

Internship/Sponsorship program - In the fall of 2003, Dane sponsored 2 separate college design school projects. The design project was recorded and documented for the students. The final work was presented at the Consumer Electronics show in January, 2004. The project was such a good experience for the students, that many of them were asked to interview for internships. Dane led these extra-effort initiatives as a way to connect with a select number of design schools and recruit students that would normally have no impression of what Microsoft was doing.

As of 2005, 2 interns have been hired to full-time positions within Microsoft.

 

Author: Sharing Digital Photos: The Future of Memories. Microsoft Press. Feb. 2003

In 2002, Dane authored a book for Microsoft Press. As a part of Microsoft's 'internal moonlighting' program, Dane wrote, designed and coordinated a 240 page book about the 'Future' of memory authoring using digital cameras. As a designer and father, Dane used his expertise in Sequential Media and digital story-telling to create a unique point of view on the perspective & technologies used in memory making.

The experience led to a number of speaking opportunities, translation of the book into 3 languages, and exposure to a world-wide audience. Dane is now received as a Digital photography expert and continues to speak & author content on the subject. In 2004 -2005, Dane authored an online tutorial on the Future of Memories. He is currently in the middle of his 2^nd revision of his book for release in the fall of 2005.

 

BMW Designworks/USA - (Aug 2001- October 2001) Consultant, Advanced Communications Group
Newbury Park, California

BMW - Goals: Responsible to design and manage project prototypes and ongoing iterations for the Advanced Communications Group. Provide subject-matter expertise for specific information design and application development. Support product design group in prototype vehicle development.

Accomplishments included:

-- Successfully integrated information designs into prototype vehicle for Munich evaluation

-- Created a visual taxonomy for the presentation of real-time information presented in the vehicle

-- Successful execution of visual system. Latest information suggested that work was accepted into vehicles to be premiered in 2006.

 

Scient Corporation ( March 2000 - April 2001 ) Director, Visual Design
San Francisco, California
New York, New York