Jack D. Davis

I'm a skilled designer and capable leader with business acumen (MBA); a rare combination of abilities in one person!

At my core, I’m a product designer with diverse experience spanning video games, consumer electronics, educational software, and productivity tools for web, mobile, desktop, and game consoles. My superpower is taming complexity: hunkering down, working through the details, and emerging with solutions.

Next, my advanced interpersonal skills allow me to navigate organizations to achieve design goals and maintain healthy relationships with colleagues, stakeholders, clients, and partners.

In addition, I'm a skilled team leader who has built teams, established processes, and managed and mentored fellow designers.

Finally, my MBA helps me understand products in the contexts of the business, product strategy, and competitive landscape. This perspective helps me make design decisions that balance customer and business needs.

And why do I design? For the thrill of bringing something new to the world and seeing the impact it makes. It never gets old!

 

Read on to learn more about my experience and skillset.  

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Design Tools

• UX:  Figma, Axure, Adobe Creative Suite, Miro, Visio, User Zoom, Survey Monkey, etc

• Games:  Numerous proprietary engines, 3D editors, and scripting languages; Lua script, VS Code, C++, Unreal 4/5 (personal projects)

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Video Game Design

12 years’ industry experience designing for AAA games for major brands, developers, publishers and platforms.

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• Lead design

  • Lead the creative direction

  • Lead design teams:  hire, define processes & pipelines, coordinate work of disparate teams, mentor and grow the team

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• Level design

  • Define campaign arcs/overarching story of an entire game

  • Own design of specific levels/missions:  concept, build the environment (model, texture, lighting), script gameplay events, collaborate with engineers/artists, and with QA to refine and fix bugs

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• Game design

  • ​Design game mechanics, rules, combat, enemies, bosses, units, vehicles, weapons, UIs, control schemes, tutorials

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• Audio production

  • Manage the creation and implementation of sound fx and music.  I have a good ear and the organizational skills to bring it all together.

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• Writing

  • Story, dialog, in-game text

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User Experience Design

10 years’ industry experience designing consumer electronics, mobile apps, websites, wearables, and desktop productivity software.  I have broad UX skills in research, design, design evaluation, and graphic design.

 

• Research:  define what we are building, for whom, and why

  • Understand/define product strategy

  • Understand the user/player

    • Interpret market data, quant data

    • Conduct surveys (user zoom, etc)

    • Conduct customer interviews

    • Ethnography

    • Define personas/user archetypes

    • Analyze workflows

    • Benchmark competitors

    • Card sorting

    • Collaborative design

  • Define requirements (all above activities lead to this)

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• Design:  ideate solutions, define the experience that fulfills requirements

  • Design workflows

  • Information architecture: how a complex experience, site, or UI is structured

  • Interaction design:  define the screens or finer steps of the experience, how it’s organized for the user, how it’s intuitive to interact with

  • Taxonomy: intuitive naming conventions

  • Design UIs

    • Team brainstorming

    • Sketch (paper/whiteboard)

    • Wireframe

    • Prototype UIs in low or hi-fi, static or interactive (Figma, Axure, Adobe XD, etc)

  • Write design docs, copy, tooltips, error messages, etc.​

  • Design experiences that adhere to good usability principles.

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• ​Design evaluation:  test ideas, ensure we built the right thing, or evaluate usability of an existing experience

  • Facilitate design reviews

  • Define & measure KPIs

  • Analyze workflows

  • Facilitating usability testing (AKA playtesting)

  • Perform or facilitate heuristic evaluation

  • Facilitate PURE evaluation (Pragmatic Usability Rating by Experts)

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• Graphic design/visual design:  the look and feel of the experience

  • I have graphic design skills, but this is not my premiere skill-set

  • My skills are suitable for communicating and testing ideas, and for hi-fi prototyping

  • I typically collaborate with graphic designers who create the final product's visual assets

 

Business Skills

• Leadership

  • Define the team vision/goal

  • Lead by example, through service, and through honesty

  • Establish collaborative, cooperative, and healthy relationships with team and adjacent teams (marketing, engineering, art, stakeholders, 3rd party partners)

  • Mentor others

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• Management

  • Hire and build the team

  • Collaborate with recruiting and HR

  • Define processes, standards, pipelines, deliverables, milestones

  • Ensure teams are coordinated

  • Conduct performance evaluations

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• Product management

  • Define product strategy

  • Define product roadmaps & MVPs

  • Lead cross-functional teams to deliver experiences

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• Business education

  • MBA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA

  • BSBA Management Information Systems, Northeastern University, Boston, MA

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Design Approach

I believe teams create the best products when they take the time to understand the problem, ideate, test the ideas, choose the best one, build it, ship it, monitor and continually improve it.  And, of course, move freely among these modes as necessary.  

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When it comes to specific processes and methods, I believe every situation is unique.  I carefully consider the team, culture, business and user goals, and figure out the best ways to work.  I'm proficient in a wide variety of research and design methods to suit the situation, and am always striving to add to my knowledge.

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Contact

Feel free to contact me for networking, project opportunities, or to learn more about my work!

 

jack@jd-interactive.com

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