Professional Software Development Consulting

Software & Web Development

I have eleven years of professional software development experience, including three years leading and managing software development efforts in a Fortune 1000 corporate environment. My primary technical skillset revolves around Java/J2EE and Spring web development. I have experience working on all application tiers and can help you with anything from providing technical guidance to building an entire application or website from scratch.

Experience and skills

• Eleven years of professional software development experience
• Three years of software development management experience
• Expertise with Java/J2EE and related APIs/frameworks (Spring, Hibernate, XML, XSLT, Swing, much more)
• Solid experience with client technologies such as HTML/XHTML, CSS, YUI Grids, JavaScript, DOM
• Solid experience with database schema design, SQL, MySQL
• Expertise in user-centered design and usability engineering
• Strong visual and communication design sense
• Strong communications skills and attention to detail

User-Centered Design & Usability Engineering

On the web, it is critical that your site be easy to navigate and use. Frustrated visitors will simply click away to a competitor's site.

User-centered design (UCD) is a design approach that promotes software usefulness and usability. It emphasizes the importance of involving the end user—the one who actually uses the software—in the entire software development process. The reason is that this allows the development team to better understand the nature of the user's work, and to know whether the software correctly, efficiently and pleasantly supports that work.

Experience and skills

• Seven years of professional UCD/usability engineering experience
• Three years of UCD/usability management experience
• Experience with contextual inquiry, work modeling, prototyping, usability inspection methods, and usability testing

Services offered

• Training in user-centered design methods, including
  • discovery methods (such as contextual inquiry), which help you better understand the tasks your users are trying to perform;
  • discount usability inspection methods (heuristic evaluations, cognitive walkthroughs), which give you a low-cost way to identify potential usability problems with your app or website; and
  • usability testing, which allows you to see real users interacting with your app or website, and to see the usability problems they encounter
• Usability inspections (e.g., heuristic evaluations and cognitive walkthroughs) for software applications and websites
• Usability testing for software applications and websites