These are the people who work day and night to make wpf and web applications beautiful.
Kris has been involved in all aspects of the Software Development Life Cycle; Design, Development, Quality Assurance, and Support, somehow she managed to land in the wonderful world of UX. Over the past 14 years, she gained a unique insight into the development and usage of Tax & Accounting software products. This allowed her to launch several improvement processes that are driving UX to the forefront of the company's agile development processes. She loves designing, learning new technologies, and delighting our customers. She is extremely lucky to have a wonderful team of designers to work with!
Throughout her 16 years at CCH, she has experienced many facets of the Software Development Lifecycle including Support, Quality Assurance, Requirements and Design, and InContext Design. This experience, along with a lot of research and learning has brought her to the exciting arena of User Experience. She loves learning new things – be it a new tool, UX practice or technology. She also enjoys creating wireframes, she can’t create just one! There are a multitude of approaches to wireframing a feature; finding the right balance between consistency, simplicity, usability and ensuring we delight the customer is exciting.
I work with a great team and look forward to seeing where we take our products in the future!
Farwa has about 8 years of experience in graphic design. She has worked in different industries and companies in these past years, harnessing and growing as design shifts from print to digital. She has worked as both a designer and front end developer within Marketing Departments and in-house Creative Agencies. She has studied at the University of Texas Austin, the Arts Institute of Austin, and is pursuing another degree online at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her primary hobbies are photography and art, however her true obsessions are food and adventure!
April has been with the company since May 2004, shortly after graduating with a BA degree in English with a specialization in technical communication from Texas Tech University. She was the first Technical Publications team member based in the Wichita office. Since then, she has worked on modernizing and maintaining the Technical Publications departmental CSS and template files to help maintain consistency across the suite of products. April has created documentation for multiple products, including CCH Axcess Practice, Workstream, Administration Manager, Dashboard, Data Migration Utility, and the Data Analysis Tool. She has also worked on CCH ProSystem fx Tax, Engagement, Practice Management, and KnowledgeConnect. She was instrumental in the conversion of Tax Analyst developed content from RTF files to HTML, which allowed for improved single-sourcing of content for help and guides that can be customized for both CCH ProSystem fx and CCH Axcess Tax customers. April is a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, and has worked to improve process efficiency in multiple LSS projects. She is the recipient of several awards, such as an Innovation Award for mobile application design and was an Achievement Club recipient. She currently lives near Maize, KS with her husband and their 6-year-old son.
Todd Barner is an advocate for the user. Through design, information architecture, layout and an understanding of the user, he conceptualizes and creates solutions based on their needs. Has over 18 years of experience creating and building web sites, intranets and applications.
He has worked on numerous types of projects and served in a variety of roles. Re-creating and designing web sites from the ground up, improving the effectiveness of existing applications or re-architecting corporate Intranets. He has served as being the team lead and point of contact with customers, creating the wireframes and prototypes of proposed solutions or doing the visual design and HTML code of the pages. He knows what it takes to understand the needs of his customers and delivery a solution that meets and exceeds their expectations.
He graduated from Baylor University with a BA in Telecommunications and then attended the Art Institute of Dallas and received an Associates in Multimedia/Animation.
He has grown up in Dallas and married to Stefani with 2 daughters, Natalie (12) and Brooke (7) and 1 dog, Sierra (16). When not working, he is busy being dad to his girls, enjoys traveling, playing video games and a bit of photography when possible.
Cole is too young to have done anything important to warrant a biography. Check back in ten years!
On a more serious note... Cole is the bridge between designers and developers. He keeps the peace and tries to mediate between both groups.
Email: cole.mecum@wolterskluwer.com