Back in the days of the command-line environment, when the browsers were named Lynx and Mosaic, at-home connection speeds were 2400 baud, and SysAdmins actually did tell you to RTFM, a graduate student from over in Media Studies wandered into the CS department and asked for helped building a gopher site. Fortunately, the wise folks there paid no attention to her request. Instead they showed her how to code hypertext markup language for this thing called the Web.

At the time, she was supposed to be writing her dissertation, an ethnography about virtual identity and virtual community at a place called LambdaMOO. She tried dividing her time between research, teaching, and web design, but the truth is, the moment Kris saw her first web page load on screen, she was hooked. Despite a very lucky gig being paid to baffle students and colleagues with arcane Unix commands and poly-syllabic post-modernist phrases, she abandoned the bright eyes of the classroom and the path of the velvet beanie. Goodbye, academe. Hello, Web.

In the early fall of 1996, Kris was lured into a dark, cold warehouse by some bright young people to work as employee number five at a little startup named DigitalThink, in San Francisco. Twenty-two months, 17 catalog courses, and at least 753 double mochas later, in 1998, she shifted laterally from instructional design and web-based training to focus exclusively on application user interface and interaction design.

Highlights
During her career, Kris has designed a wide variety of applications for the web, desktop, and PocketPC--from enterprise-level server administration and a variety of B2B and B2C eCommerce tools--to consumer-oriented applications for online dating and online tax filing. She has worked closely with engineering, product management, marketing, and executive teams to design interfaces for Java Swing, Windows .Net/MFC, and Windows Pocket PC, as well as standard web presentation layer technologies.

Most recently, as Director of User Interface Design at Rocket Communications, she participated in business development conversations, recruited and managed a pool of interface designers, information architects and usability specialists, and participated as lead UI designer on a number of projects.

Prior to joining Rocket, she was one of the founding members of Satori Labs, a self-funded startup focusing on software development for the Anoto digital pen. As Director of Design and Usability (the official hat), she led a user-focused design process to collaboratively invent and develop FusionForm, a digital pen-and-paper solution for healthcare forms automation. FusionForm for Healthcare was designed with and for its users, with their direct participation, from the very start. In addition to winning the invitation to launch at the famous technology launchpad conference, DEMO, FusionForm continues to win tremendous user acceptance in each of its deployments at outstanding healthcare facilities, including very busy emergency rooms and clinics, across the US.

Over the years she has been blessed to work with some very smart and talented people at Adobe, CableLabs, Catalyst Resources, Cost Plus World Market, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu, Pinnacle Rock, the Presidio Trust, ShopTok, and West Marine.

Education
Kris spent a bit of time in school. Her educational credentials include a Bachelor of Science degree in Geosciences, a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, both from Purdue University, a Master of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri, and in 1995 she earned doctoral candidacy in the Media Studies Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she remains all-but-dissertation. Consequently, in addition to a core science foundation from a proper engineering education, she has substantial formal training in qualitative research, information architecture, message design and visual communications, as well.

Just don't ask her to explain how to perform triple integrals in spherical coordinates, distinguish between a horst and a scarp, or translate Heideggerian historicity into English. That's what the Web is for. And isn't it amazing?