Karen Roles' Biography

Profile

Karen Roles is a senior User Experience Architect with excellent conceptualisation and problem solving skills. Client-facing, but with a strong background in business strategy and product development, Karen specialises in requirements capture and analysis and user-centric design.

Highly organised with the ability to master complex, advanced technologies, Karen has a proven track record of delivering accessible concepts and architectures that meet customer needs and translate into successful products. As the customer advocate, Karen has bridged the chasm between marketing and development to engage and motivate teams to create both tactical products and strategic roadmaps.

Broad portfolio of skills ranging from web design; data centre optimisation; application dependency mapping; network and system management; to fault tolerance and the virtualisation of horizontally scaled systems.

Summary

After graduating from Surrey University with a Masters Degree in Information Systems Engineering, Karen has spent over ten years developing user interfaces and designing web sites.

While at university, Karen was sponsored by ICL (now part of Fujitsu). After completing her Masters, Karen joined a small computer company called Integrated Micro Products, IMP which developed highly speciailised fault tolerant computers. Following the acquisition of IMP by Sun MIcrosystems, Karen worked in a number of senior positions with ownership of the lights out management user interfaces of specialised, highly innovative computer systems designed for the telecommunications and data center markets. Main responsibilities during this period include technical leadership of international teams developing user interfaces for multi-million dollar product ranges, customer requirements capture and representing the product ranges at corporate level user experience strategy committees. Karen holds six worldwide patents in the area of configuration of fault tolerant computers, SNMP and management of horizontally scaled computer networks.

Following Sun Microsystems, Karen continued to develop her profile as a User Experience Architect. Following a range of commissions and freelancing contracts for company web site and application design, Karen now works as a Senior User Experience Engineer for Tideway Systems. As part of the Architecture Team within this small company, Karen is responsible for defining the functional and visual user interfaces for the companies flagship product. Foundation provides server and application discovery and mapping software that is used for risk analysis, change management, compliance and auditing within data centres and mission-critical customer networks.

Full CV: PDF | Text

Experience

Tideway Systems, Senior User Experience Engineer 2005-todate

  • Member of architecture team responsible for user experience of the Tideway Foundation product, focussing on usability improvements to the deployment of Foundation throughout customer estates and reducing the cost of modelling application dependencies.
  • Identifying and defining the key user personas to support the strategic business direction, generation of user scenarios for key user tasks, defining of user-centric product requirements, designing supporting wireframes and UI prototypes.
  • Extensive customer and user interviews and research, analysing user needs and company direction to recommend product strategies, conducting usability and heuristic reviews.
  • Key challenges are finding pragmatic ways to reduce the complexities of scale of managing large scale, distributed estates and to reduce the cost and expertise required to deploy application dependency modelling throughout customer estates.

Experience

Sun Microsystems Limited, User Interface Architect 2002-2004

  • Architectural lead on international projects working with user interface developers both internal to Sun and external partners.
    • Specified web-based user interface for the integrated switch in Sun’s first blade-server platform working closely with the Usability Specialist.
    • Specified command line and web-based user interface for the lights-out management controller for the thin-server and blade server platforms
  • Presented IAs to corporate architectural and strategic approvals committees
  • Chaired the Sun working group responsible for the strategic direction of Sun’s lights-out management user interfaces for Sun’s server products

link to portfolio

Sun Microsystems Limited, System Management Architect/Designer 1994– 2002

  • Architectural lead of a team of ten senior engineers
  • Defined product concept for the data centre management of server hardware and software deployment
    • Employed Six Sigma Pugh Matrix methodology to make recommendations on initial technology selection
  • Architected a distributed management agent utilising a CIM object model and exposing management data through GUI, SNMPv3, and CIM/WBEM
  • Specified SUN-PLATFORM-MIB which became the Sun standard MIB for the management of platform hardware

link to portfolio

Freelance and Contract Work

Oyster, Senior User Experience Architect, 2005-2005

  • Senior user experience architect working an account for a telecommunications company's next generation broadband service.
  • Main deliverables included user scenarios for the targetted key personas and pixel-perfect wireframes for customer presentations
  • Typical activities included customer consultations, analysing persona tasks and generating wireframes in accordance with the customer's style guide.

Amphora Research Systems, User Interface Designer, 2004-2005

  • Information architect and interaction designer providing requirements capture and user interface design services for PatentSafe, Amphora's market leading patent evidence creation and preservation software.
  • Main deliverables included user personas, interaction diagrams, concept designs, taxonomy and pixel-perfect wireframes.
  • Typical activities included user task analysis and content analysis, consulting with small biotechs, internationalisation and online help, graphic and visual design, and coordinating code development with the GUI developer.

link to portfolio

P4PI, Information Architect 2004-2005

  • Information architect providing advice on business strategy, site objectives, site architecture and content for the startup company's web site.
  • Main deliverables included user personas, business and site goals, key branding concepts and metaphors, initial content inventory and initial wireframes to take to the web designer,

link to portfolio

Quality Timber Decking Company, Web Designer 2004-2005

  • Information architect and web designer providing landscape and content analysis, information architecture, interaction design and web development and graphic services for redesigning the company's web site.
  • Responsibility for the entire site, main deliverables included content inventory, site graphics and images, development code and JavaScript programming and CGI programming with perl.

link to portfolio

Synovation, Freelance Web Designer 2005

  • Currently developing two web sites for Synovation and Blue Amp.

link to portfolio