About Me
e rick.hoobler@gmail.com
p +1.847.668.5671
I love guiding individual designers as well as design teams towards exceptional design solutions. I love helping designers succeed & grow in their careers & creating encouraging & vibrant design cultures. I’m looking for an opportunity to be a design leader at a company that values user centered design, agile development, exceptional culture, & has product aspirations that will do good for people around the world.
Work
iRobot Corp., Bedford MA
VP of Design
2017–2023
• Scaled design by 7X & significantly raised talent level
• Saved company 3 mil+/yr by building internal design team vs prior agency dependence
• Built award winning (Good Design, Red Dot, etc.) design team
• Instituted Design Research as a new capability providing high impact data for successful product definition & validation
• Led successful full redesign of companion app for what is considered the category leading app experience
• Increased in-app revenue to 12+ mil/yr via design improvements, a 25X increase over 4 yrs
• Improved app rating by 1.3 points
• Amazon product ratings consistently 4.0+
• Instituted a Top 10 Areas to Improve list based on user data, now adopted by product & engineering
• Redesigned packaging to be ~40% more sustainable, saving 1 mil/yr, & is considered the most premium looking & easiest unboxing/setup in RVC category
Motorola Mobility, Google, Lenovo, Chicago IL
Global Director of User Experience
2002–2017
.Sr Designer > Design Manager > Director > Sr. Director > Global Sr. Director
• Originally an IC designer for phone UX/UI, accessory UX for hardware, lighting audio, & voice design
• Led UX & content teams in mobile UX/UI, mobile touch platform UX/UI, navigation device UX/UI, & BT accessory UX
• Successfully led a cross-functional team to design our first UX/UI capacitive touch platform for the Motorola Evoke & Krave (Verizon)
• Led UX/UI design for wearable devices, & companion fitness & wellness apps launching multiple products under our sport MOTOACTV brand, & later under our fashion MOTO360 brand
• Successfully led design teams which shipped 40+ products (hardware UX + UI, & multiple companion apps) across 10+ categories
Fitch Inc., Columbus OH
Sr. Interaction Designer & Group Lead
1999–2002
• IC UX/UI designer for telematics, aviation, medical, web apps, web brand experiences, & ecommerce
• Primary clients were Nissan, Goodrich Aerospace, Guidant, HP, 3M, Liberty Mutual, & Omaha Steaks.
• Designed UX & UI for Nissan on both a concept car for the Tokyo Auto Show as well as the production Murano infotainment interface
Education
Carnegie Mellon University
Master of Design in Communication Planning & Design
Thesis Project: Wayfinding for Independent Living, DEA Gold Award Winner
University of Pittsburgh
BA, Philosophy; Minor, Fine Arts
also
NorthWestern University
Engineering Design Innovation Advisory Board Member, at the McCormick School of Engineering
2019–present
Serving
EBAC Academy & Orphanage, Cap-Haitien Haiti
I created a computer lab for a high school & taught basic computer skills, distributed 100’s of mobile phones to individuals & families, created a fund & oversaw the building of a house for the Joseph family. I’m involved in ongoing efforts to help families’ nutritional, medical, & educational needs & become financially self-sufficient.
2013-present
Credits
FITCH
Fortunately for me, Fitch was tightly aligned & a close partner with Carnegie Mellon. Working there felt like a very natural extension of my graduate degree. Sherie Masters was a great design leader for that fantastic little design group she led. Steve Simula was a genius to watch & learn from. And Floris Keizer was incomparable re digital display design & anything that benefitted from a grid. They directed &/or touched most of what I worked on, & taught me a great deal. Shout out also to Karen Evans for being a great first design manager, & also exceptional at IA & wireframing.
MOTOROLA
16 years is a lot of time to spend anywhere, & Motorola years seem more like dog years than human, so the list of people who impacted my work is too long to fully mention. But I’ll try. Starting at the top Jim Wicks was a great boss, mentor, & showed us all how to build & sustain a people-centered, user-centered design team within the context of a large corporation. And all under very challenging business environments. Doug Walston, Conrad Newman, Rob Strong, Parrish Hannah, & Jim Palmer create a who’s-who list of exceptional design leaders & great managers. Getting to work with people as talented & likable as Max Yoshimoto, Paul Pierce, Yiwen Mu, Matt MacQueen, Sandy Fershee, Steve Herbst, & Kristin Arnold (to name only a few) was such a privilege & has changed me in many ways for the better. Other people who impacted work in my portfolio are:
.ID – Dickon Isaacs, Chris Houghton, Chad Davis, Mike Paradise, Katie Morgenroth, & Rhea Jeong
.UX&UI – Kathryn Thomas, Yiwen Mu, Patricia Basuel, Stevi McBrian, Paul Robare, Jeremy Jobling, Jeffrey Olson, & Lauren Schwendimann
.Design Research – Kristin Arnold, Laura Joss, & Lexi Valasek
.Agency support – Frog on MOTONAV
iROBOT
When I started at iRobot design was under the Engineering org & I had a great boss, mentor & supporter in Tim Saeger. We built a great design team anchored by Insun Hong & her excellent industrial design team. Vanessa Wiegel built a very strong research team from scratch with researchers like Lauren Stern making broad impact on product experience & planning. Daniel Frysinger rounded out the team by elevating our UX & UI designers to a level higher than ever before. Keith Hartsfield has been super supportive of me & the design team, helping us have greater impact on our portfolio & moving us further into product discovery. Our team has had some really special members like Shipra Arora, Shannon Case, Phil Petrides, Insun Hong, Craig Butterworth, Ben Schriesheim, Cory White, & Jessie Huang…..to name just a few. I’m very grateful for all of them, together we elevated user centered design across ID, UX, UI, Design Research, Content, & Packaging.
.Agency support – Fuse on early ID, Chris Lefteri Design for interior design trending