John Dunning
john @ johndunning . com

 

  

 .com
   

Yahoo! : Director of Product Management 
March 2014 – present
Led product management for Yahoo Web Mail. Worked with multiple scrum teams to define, build and ship new functionality across all of the web clients while maintaining revenue targets. Leveraged detailed data analysis, A/B tests, and usability studies to validate new features. Migrated millions of users to a new client on a new tech stack without affecting retention. Built many prototypes and internal tools with JavaScript, Node and React.

  
 

Yahoo! : Senior Product Manager 
September 2006 – March 2014
Led product management for Yahoo Messenger desktop and web clients. Rolled out a plug-in API that enabled third-party developers to integrate with Messenger and access our large user base. Occasionally put on my designer and coder hats to help out.

  • Worked with multiple agile scrum teams, some co-located and some remote, to maintain product backlogs and to prioritize user stories for each sprint.
  • Collaborated closely with the global product team to ensure that Messenger shipped simultaneously in 29 different localized versions in markets around the world.
  • Built tools that automatically produce reports from raw data to help the product team track key engagement, usage and monetization metrics.
  
 

Pixar Animation Studios : Senior Interaction Designer 
November 2005 – June 2006
Helped design the next generation of in-house production tools. Met with animators, riggers, lighters and other crew members to understand user needs throughout the movie production process. Designed patent-pending tools to manage deep hierarchies of 3D elements.

  
 

Yahoo! : Senior Interaction Designer 
August 2003 – October 2005
Served as design lead for two major releases of Yahoo! Messenger, helping the product grow from 48 million to 90 million users and winning the CNET Editor's Choice for IM clients.

  • Responsible for all aspects of the product development process, from collaborating with product managers on defining requirements to participating in field research to documenting designs in detailed UI specifications.
  • Worked closely with design researchers to thoroughly usability test paper mockups, high-fidelity prototypes and working versions of Messenger with our user base. Halved the error scores of key tasks.
  • Built and maintained a detailed prototype to work through design concepts, test interfaces in the lab and communicate design directions to other team members.
  • Reviewed UI specifications and iterated on designs in response to feedback from engineers, QA, PMs and other designers throughout the development process.
  • Partnered with product manager to communicate to executives the design and business rationale of new features, successfully shepherding 7.0 through the product approval process to an on-time, simultaneous launch in 17 countries.
  
 

Intuit : Senior User Interface Designer 
February 2003 – August 2003
Led the design effort on three new initiatives for the 2004 version of QuickBooks Financial Software. Worked with a cross-functional team of product managers, visual designers, technical writers, engineers and QA to design features that met both user and business goals. Conducted customer site visits to better understand the accounting needs of small business owners.

  

Cooper : Principal Design Consultant 
May 1999 – February 2003
Researched, conceptualized and designed desktop applications, handheld devices, websites and other interactive products for clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Recent projects include a trading application for a major online brokerage, a custom hardware interface for controlling golf course irrigation, a handheld blood glucose meter, and a visual programming environment for the development of Enterprise Java Beans.

  • Led design teams whose satisfied clients consistently hired Cooper for additional work—a total of two team-year’s worth of follow-on projects.
  • Used personas, scenarios, ethnographic interviews and other elements of the Goal-Directed methodology to design products that please their users.
  • Conducted in-depth customer research and analysis of varied technical domains, including diabetes treatment, securities trading, and enterprise storage resource management.
  • Designed a storage management application for Fujitsu Softek that won the Storage Management Product of the Year award.
  • Developed an intranet-based knowledge management tool that enabled the design and sales departments to better leverage the studio’s intellectual property.
  • Wrote extensions to Macromedia Fireworks that helped Cooper designers create interface sketches more efficiently. Also trained and supported the staff in the use of Fireworks.
  

Moonstone Interactive : Interaction Design Consultant
August 1998 – May 1999
Designed a digital camera application for Agfa that ships with all of its cameras. Employed usage scenarios and user interviews to design an application that would make it easy for consumers to download, organize and edit their images.

  • Developed a detailed prototype for usability testing and for demonstrating the application’s design.
  • Designed and conducted a usability test to investigate the software’s ease-of-use.
  • Maintained a website of screen designs and prototypes to communicate with a team of clients and developers who were distributed over two continents and several time-zones.
  

mFactory : User Interface Designer
April 1996 – March 1998
Worked on the interface design for mTropolis, an award-winning, object-oriented multimedia authoring tool. Collaborated with marketing and engineering teams to define the feature set of new versions of mTropolis.

  • Wrote and maintained detailed design specifications for each feature.
  • Held participatory design sessions and site visits with users.
  • Designed and implemented plug-in tools and libraries of reusable components for release with version 2.0.
  • Edited and wrote portions of the mTropolis documentation.
 

Apple Computer : Software Engineer
June 1995 – April 1996
In the 3D Acceleration and Entertainment Group, wrote tools to simplify the testing and development of 3D graphics acceleration cards for the Macintosh. Also implemented portions of the user interface for QuickDraw 3D 1.1.

  

Digital Objectives : Software Engineer
November 1993 – June 1995
Became first in-house programmer for Digital Objectives, a PDA software startup. Developed prototype and proof-of-concept software on the Newton platform.

  
 

Foundation for Student Communication : Art Director
September 1990 – September 1992
Created the position of art director at FSC, a student organization which publishes a national magazine and holds annual conferences attracting 700 students, executives and political leaders from around the world.

  • Completely redesigned Business Today magazine’s layout.
  • Produced logos, cover illustrations, graphs and charts.
  • Redesigned and produced the post-conference booklets, which are used as promotional materials during the summer fund-raising drive.
  
 

Foundation for Student Communication : Production Manager
December 1989 – June 1992
Responsible for the on-time production of Business Today, the nation’s largest entirely student-run magazine with a $600,000 budget and a readership of over 500,000.

  

 .edu
   

Princeton University: Major – Computer Science. Minor – Linguistics.
1989 – 1992, 1994 – 1995

Computer Science Independent Work
Senior Thesis
September 1994 – June 1995
Developed an easy-to-use Hypertext Markup Language editor for the Macintosh, incorporating drag-and-drop creation of URLs and WYSIWYG editing.

First Semester Project
September 1991 – January 1992
Created a program capable of automatically generating kerning pairs for PostScript fonts. The algorithm worked by calculating and then adjusting the area enclosed by pairs of letterforms rendered on-screen by the NeWS PostScript interpreter on an Iris.

 
 

Second Semester Project
February 1992 – June 1992
Wrote a voxel-based, 3D modeling system. Users could drag a “paintbrush” through three-dimensional space to sketch freehand, or they could draw polygonal lines and then convert them to voxels.

  

Computers and Art Class
September 1992 – January 1993
Created a detailed model of a gallery with Alias modeling software. Produced several stereoscopic views of the room and output them to slides. Then installed 3D viewers containing the slides in the actual room so that when people looked through the viewers, they saw the room transformed in various ways.

 
 

Rhode Island School of Design
Summer 1990
Refined and expanded layout and design skills in two classes: Publications Design and Typography.

  

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Computer Skills 

  • Languages: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, PHP, ActionScript, C, C++, and some C#.
  • Graphics Software: Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash.
  

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Conferences 

  • CHI 2004, Vienna, Austria
  • JavaOne 2001, San Francisco, CA
  • VB Live! 2001, San Francisco, CA
  • CHI 2001, Seattle, WA
  • User Interface Science and Technology '98, San Francisco, CA
  • CHI '98, Los Angeles, CA
  • User Interface Science and Technology '97, Banff, Alberta
  • User Interface Science and Technology '96, Seattle, WA
  • SIGGRAPH '96, New Orleans, LA
  • CHI '96, Vancouver, British Columbia
  • SIGGRAPH '95, Los Angeles, CA

Organizations

  • SIGCHI
  • BayCHI
  • Association for Software Development
  • Association for Computing Machinery
  

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Résumé in Microsoft Word format.

 

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Résumé in text format.