Chad Jennings

EF Education First is the world's largest private education company. EF is a privately-held company with 16 divisions that offer a range of educational programs from language training, educational travel, and academic degrees to cultural exchanges. With a mission to break down barriers in language, culture and geography, EF has helped people of all ages and nationalities become citizens of the world.

After nearly seven years building Blurb into a highly successful company, I decided to leave and take a few months off to travel, reconnect with family and friends, recharge, and work on a few personal projects. It was a rare and wonderful break.

• Led product management, design, product marketing, content and product analytics/optimization for Blurb's suite of creation tools and self-publishing platform.
• Scaled team from four to seventeen full time employees including forming new product optimization and content teams.
• Owned the product roadmap defining Blurb's print and digital book vision including most recently the successful launch of Proline; integrations with Adobe, Instagram and Facebook; rollout of four new languages; and V1 ebook conversion, creation and distribution to Apple's iBookstore.
• Collaborated with engineering on the reorganization of teams to roll-out SCRUM based agile processes across all product teams.
• Led a major strategic partnership to integrate Blurb into Adobe Lightroom 4 using our API platform.
• Collaborated cross-functionally to consistently meet conversion, revenue, and customer experience corporate goals.

As the Director of Product Design I led the product and user requirements gathering for our software, web site, book products and brand. Built and led a multidisciplinary team of visual designers, user experience designers, producers, writers, front-end developers and vendors.

Led a large project for HP to define an interface and navigation strategy for their small screen and remote drive products. This required managing a large cross-disciplinary team spanning Smart's offices as well as ten product groups across HP's worldwide locations. Project included comprehensive analysis of HP's current product offer, iterative design and prototype testing of both soft and hard interfaces, and detailed interactive specifications. One of the results is HP's 'Q' interface that is being rolled out across a majority of their consumer and business products.

Part of leadership team that responded to RFP's and managed resources, client stakeholders and budget. Additional notable projects include an interactive television interface for Samsung's Korean market and a call center application interface for Microsoft and Bank of America which was estimated to save Bank of America 10-15 million dollars a year.

Built out the interaction design and user research offering, methodology, and tools. Within a short period these services became an integral and highly profitable part of the overall business. Performed competitive and user research including photo diaries and contextual interviews, persona and scenario creation, paper and interactive prototype development,
detailed information architecture and UI designs and specifications. Responsible for facilitating client meetings and workshops, general project and client management, scheduling, cross-discipline collaboration, and proposal creation. Notable clients include Palm, Autodesk, Macromedia / Adobe, Sun Microsystems, HP, Peoplesoft, Reuters Innovation Center, Boost Mobile, Nuance, Consumer Review, and Gucci.

http://www.id.iit.edu/

Radiowave was a subsidiary of Motorola. Led a design team in charge of research, concept development, and implementation of a loyalty program surrounding RadioWave.com’s core product. Served as facilitator for user research and focus groups. Gained an incredible amount of insight as team member researching and documenting the firms’ online marketing plan. Other responsibilities included web development and rapid prototyping.

Worked with team members on a variety of internet and multimedia projects. Responsibilities included information architecture, graphic design, and production. Produced a multimedia CD-ROM. My tenure served as an incredible opportunity to experience and examine the new media design process. Promoted from intern to a continuing freelance position at the end of the summer.