Rachel Hollowgrass

EXPERIENCE

My roles over time

University of California • 2008–Present

Berkeley CA

User Experience Lead 2020–Present
Senior User Experience Designer 2015–2019

Berkeley campus

User experience lead, SIS Replacement project, a 200-person-team implementing a custom front end (CalCentral) with multiple databases.

Chair, Berkeley UX, and its campus Usability Workshop, an annual event for the University of California System.
Led UX internship program for students in graduate UXD and UXR programs for academic credit.
Transformed inter-department relationships from UX-hostile to UX-friendly
Projects

Initiated Symposium on the Student Experience, an annual event for multi-institutional UX collaboration.
Created and led UCUX, a UX community of practice for 500K staff, students and faculty.
Created and led the Student Innovation Program, an emerging constellation of structures including resource repositories, mentoring, and discovery tools.
Created and led the design track for annual UC Tech conference.
Created and led community presentations on design systems.
Initiated and led over 30 usability assessments, including a machine learning recommendation engine, chatbots, and a transit-planning application.

User Experience Researcher and Designer 2021–Present
Computer Systems Engineer 2014–2015

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Designer and developer of climate tools for Earth & Environmental Sciences Area

Design and develop software for climate research including the AmeriFlux and FluxNet projects, which gather and share long-term carbon, water and energy flux measurements for climate science.
Work with earth science researchers who directly identified the source of climate change as human-sourced greenhouse gases. See Observational Determination of Surface Radiative Forcing by CO₂ from 2000 to 2010 Nature, March 2015.
Employ machine learning to identify and manage data validity challenges in climate data.
Partner with the ECOSTRESS team, an instrument on the International Space Station, on validation of remote sensing data.

User Experience Designer 2008–2014

Berkeley campus

User experience designer for Student Systems and CalCentral, a personalized data aggregator for students, staff and faculty.

Conduct user research to define use cases across diverse campus populations.
Perform business and technical analysis to determine feasibility of use cases.
Analyze APIs to define support for use cases.
Present research findings to stakeholders including Berkeley's world-class faculty.
Design user experience and UI elements including interaction patterns, navigation, screens, visual design, icons, etc.
Mentor UX team members.
Co-chair, UC Berkeley campus UCD Group, an active group with over 400 members dedicated to improving the user experience of campus software projects via project usability reviews.

Guest Lecturer, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science 2012

Guest Lecturer, Graduate School of Information 2008–13

Kaiser Permanente • 2015–16

Oakland CA

Design Researcher

As a member of Kaiser Kaiser Permanente's award-winning Innovation Consultancy:

Shaped data-gathering instruments for both broad community research as well as the clinical context.
Modalities included diary studies, shadowing, and video interviews.
Domain was patient profiles for emerging medical concerns.

Stanford University • 2005–08

Stanford CA

Research Software Developer

Designed and developed interactive curricula, UI, code libraries, templates, XML schema, n-tier architecture and client-server communication for interactive language and mathematics curricula. Instructional content was Mandarin and English.
Conducted usability studies in Chile and South Korea.
Team lead for student information applications.

University of Texas, Austin / Agile Mind • 2004–12

Austin TX

Instructional Developer

Designed, developed and managed interactive, instructional media projects for curriculum developer under the auspices of the University of Texas at Austin. Responsibilities included software development, n-tier architecture, instructional design, user interface design, art direction, and code library authoring and management. Content included calculus and statistics curricula.