Resume

Helen Cunningham, Ph.D.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  • Qualitative & Quantitative User Experience Research
  • Web & Technical UI/UE Design
  • Data Analysis 

SKILLS & PREFERRED TOOLS

  • UserTesting.com, Survey Monkey, WordPress Polls, Google Analytics
  • Sketches, wire frames, A/B, prototypes, full usability tests
  • WordPress, Figma, Tableau, iMovie, Tweetdeck, Illustrator
  • Propensity models, Time Series
  • MATLAB, Java, UNIX, Python, SQL

LINKEDIN -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-cunningham-93a55713/

WEBSITE ->  Pan-Interactive Technologies – Portfolio & consulting site.

WORK EXPERIENCE

2017 – Present:  Principal at Pan-Interactive Technologies

Contract experience research & design – Clients include Fiverr, Stanford University, Cumulus Networks.  I helped them gain better response to their products, better productivity, better understanding of their own clients. 

  • Surveyed & interviewed radio listeners – Survey Monkey, WordPress Polls.  This is a national-reach podcast looking to go Premium.  I contacted 100,000 newsletter subscribers with links to a survey.  Received & processed 3000 responses & interviewed a subset of them.  My work was critical in helping my organization understand their listeners, what social media channels produce the most “engaged” users (newsletter, twitter, facebook, or website).  And how to offer them what they want to hear. 
  • Word frequency statistical analysis of email authorship – Interviews, MATLAB .  This client wanted to understand the speech patterns of various members of his huge organization and to be able to know what the concerns are of different groups writing to a chat channel.  I.e., Are they admins, engineers, technical, nontechnical, managers, or executives? Using multinomial regression I provided a proof of concept of an algorithm. 
  • Predictive model of student achievement – Focus groups, MATLAB.  This client was a local researcher who wanted to predict which children in a special ed class would achieve a set of goals and which were at risk for not succeeding. My work allowed her to predict with good accurately which traits of a child early in the process predicted success at the end. 
  • Developed my own version of UserTesting.com before it rose to prominence.  I created a system for interviewing and observing usability & user acceptance participants remotely.  This was during COVID when everyone was at home.  It is based on OBS which is a multi-channel video production application with data capture & notation capabilities. 

2019 – 2022:  Savage Enterprises, Inc. 

Assistant producer.  National radio show & podcast.  Survey Monkey, iMovie, Google Analytics, Excel. 

  • Listener research – Leveraged 100k subscriber base using surveys, interviews & questionnaires to significantly improve design & content of the organization’s web, youtube, and social media presence.
  • Redesigned YouTube channel & created content – The YT channel was languishing until I redesigned & set up connections to social media properties.  Wrote a tutorial which helped the manager get started with Live broadcasts and increased his reach significantly.   Used iMovie to create compelling podcast trailers.  Organized & retitled existing content.
  • Web user research & design.  Google Analytics deep dive + A/B testing told us our follower base wanted exciting & frequently updated web content, heavy on the week days, light on the weekends, punchy article titles, & other key insights.  Drove significant web design & content improvements & increased traffic.  Kept daily logs of web traffic & preferred stories, shared with management weekly on a private web page for easy access.
  • Technical & thought leader, team player.  Boosted team knowledge, access to complicated technologies, confidence, and team spirit. 
  • Promoted podcasts with compelling illustrations, descriptions, web showcase, & trailers.  Illustrator, WordPress, iMovie

2011 – 2017: VMware Inc.

VMW User Experience Engineer.   UX research & design for complex system administration software, research & patents related to network visualization & monitoring. 

  • User Interface Standards – Owned, developed, clarified & documented VMware Management User Interface Standards.  Included were:  Buttons & Links, Mouse Interaction, Details Views, Map Views, List Views, Wizards, Icons, Display Size, Alert Dialogs, Ipv6, Data Grids, and many more.
  • Fixed problems in vSphere (flagship system administration app).  An upgrade had made the desktop version mimic mobile UI, but was not well thought out and the result was awkward, confusing and too slow to meet system management criteria.  Using expert panels (internal VMware admins) followed by a detailed quantitative usability study, a colleague and I successfully convinced management to force a redesign.  Usability test collected time to complete tasks, percent of tasks completed, and user comments. 
  • Measurable design improvements in information organization & visualization – Created, published, and advocated for better visualizations throughout the organization. One project that won engineering support and shipped as a software upgrade, was to improve a visualization map of complex virtual machine networks.  Another project that gained executive level attention was on Hardware Visualization.  Although VMware’s virtual machines are the key management point in the server environment, the hardware each runs on still matters.  I developed a system & visualization for giving sys admins the TRANSPARENCY they need to understand hardware factors. 
  • Multiple sys admin designs successfully shipped, multiple in-house presentations & tutorials written, one patent collaboratively submitted & granted.

VMW Data Scientist.  Propensity modeling to understand how to best market upcoming new products.  Which markets are interested and likely to buy? 

  • Used logistic regression to predict sales in different market segments Highly successful models confirmed by metrics of actual sales.  Received commendations for my work.  MATLAB, Python, SQL.

1998 – 2009: Sun Microsystems Inc.

Senior Staff Engineer.  UX research, testing, design. UI design for new management products.

  • Multiple successful UI designs & advanced visualizations based on UX research.
  • Important impact through customer visits, customer panels, usability testing.
  • Envisioned, programmed, and tested advanced visualizations.
  • Multiple Patents, conference presentations & publications. 
  • Recognized expert on Alerts & Alarms (Java Look & Feel Guidelines)

Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology & Neuroscience, Stanford University

Selected Publications

Cunningham, Helen. We Are All Earthlings: The Intelligence of Animals. 2019

Cunningham, Helen. An Astronomical Event: Sun & Moon Join Hands. 2018.

Cunningham, Helen & McCusker, Deanna. Scalable Automated Provisioning Toolkit. VMWare RADIO Conference, 2013.

Cunningham, H.A. (2012) Predictive Fingerprinting of System State. INFOVis 2012.

Cunningham, H.A. (2007) Sensor Localization with Lateral Inhibition and Statistical Inference!. Fourth Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh, and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks SECON 2007. San Diego, CA.

Cunningham, Helen (2007) Dynamic Analog Glyphs for Scalable Telemetry Monitoring. IEEE Visualization 2007, Sacramento CA.

Cunningham, H.A. (2002) Bayesian Fault Diagnosis. Presentation to First Annual Statistics & Mathematical Modeling Summit, SunLabs, Menlo Park CA, October, 2002.

Patents

Cunningham, H. A. and Smith, R.B Method & Apparatus for Zooming on Non-Positional Display Attributes. U.S. Patent No. 6476829.

Cunningham, H.A. Method & System for Acoustically Locating Computer Systems. U.S. Patent No. 7191090.

Cunningham, H.A. Sensor Localization using Lateral Inhibition. U.S. Patent No. 7783457.

Cunningham, H.A., Demoff, J.S., and Wolf, A.S. Kalman Filtering for Grid Computing Telemetry and Workload Management. U.S. Patent No. 7716535.

Towstopiat, O., Cunningham, H.A., Sullivan, R., and Partridge, B., Visualizing Disaster Recovery Plan Execution for the Cloud. U.S. Patent No. 9098457.