Life is a scavenger hunt, let's enjoy finding the next clue.
Hello world.
My passion for experience design started early as an elementary school "Peace Keeper." I thrive on understanding and connecting those around me. The work below shows positions and experiences that help me understand and contribute to experience design.
Designing advanced meterological weather apps for weather nerds and the rest of us has been a whirlwind of insight. I step into other peoples minds daily as I design for pilots, environmentalists, farmers and the regular commuter. ,
Conducting user research at Microsoft has been an adventure in machine learning, finding the most influential parts of a person's life and learning from Clippy's short-comings.
Designing marketing materials and advertisements for Aurora Pens was an adventure in traditional, family owned fine Italian craftsmanship. While it was an enriching experience, it showed how important it is to have a more meaningful impact on people's long term well-being; gold and diamond pens did not.
In contrast, doing experience design for HappierMe's Positive Psychology mobile application was an awesome experience. The games that we developed will help people practice gratitude, positive thinking, build social relationships and other proven techniques to improve one's well-being.
Going forward, I'd like to use experience design, product management, user research, and positive psychology to produce meaningful and resilient experiences.
Aryn Shelander User Experience + Interface Designer
Personal Motivation: To create experiences that enhance our well-being.
UC Berkeley: Cognitive Design
BA of Interdisciplinary Studies in Cognitive Design; University of California, Berkeley: 3.64 May 2011
Cognitive Design is a self-created interdisciplinary studies major that combines cognitive science, user research and human-centered design practices to better inform the design process.
User Experience + Interface Design
Mobile UX Designer: Weather Underground San Francisco, CA: Jan 2014 - Current
Complete redesign of the flagship iOS app. Went from the top 25 to the top 5 in App Store Weather Category.
Designed the Apple watch app, including crowd reporting, and detailed precip forecast.
Created the UX for WunderStation- an iPad app (featured by Apple) for the weather geeks among us.
Researched meteorological needs and expectations of Personal Weather Station owners and lay users.
Designed info-graphics and graphs to display historical, current and forecasted weather measurements.
Co-founder + UX + UI: TimePlace Inc. San Francisco, CA: Nov 2013 - Current
Developed the TimePlace iOS app, which enables users to find what’s happening in their area at the intersection of time and place.
Developed the UI and UX for the app, which shows categorized events on a map and allows users to scroll through time to see events appear and disappear.
Currently implementing crowd reports and a Twitter layer to show up-to-the-minute content.
User Researcher: Microsoft San Francisco, CA: March 2013 - Current
Created an analytics platform to improve Cortana, Microsoft’s personal assistant. Our findings helped tune Cortana’s start up experience and start building the user profile.
Wrote guidelines on how Cortana should be implemented on Windows’ products.
Collaborated with developers to create unique back-end fuzzy logic survey functions.
Saved research team over 1,000 hours of time by automating survey processes.
PR + Experience Design: HappierMe Tel Aviv, Israel: Aug-Sep 2012
Facilitated communication with American investors for Series A investment.
In depth Positive Psychology research to design pitch presentations and recommend game features.
Collaborated on how to “gamify” Positive Psychology principles into an engaging web/mobile platform.
Product Management Internship: Streetline–Smart Parking Foster City, CA: Feb-June 2012
Lead interface design decisions, which went live regularly across three web/mobile products.
Met with engineers, lead users, PMs and QA engineers daily to ensure cohesive working products.
Collaborated with Erin Liman, Stanford University Interaction Designer, on next generation products.
Skills
Photoshop, InDesign & Illustrator
User research
Product management
Experience design
Interface and graphic design
Professional circus acrobat, hand-balancer and contortionist