if day: visionary, creative serial software entrepreneur focusing on usable software;
else: puzzle guy, photographer, pizza maker, gourmet cook, writer, blogger

Roy Leban is the founder of two Seattle-area startups, Groupthink, which provides people coordination services over the internet, and Puzzazz, a puzzle site. A serial entrepreneur, Roy is a veteran of seven previous startup companies, including ones sold to Ashton-Tate and AT&T. In the Seattle area, he spent five years at Microsoft, where he worked on Microsoft Access, Microsoft Office, and the bCentral web service.

An expert at building highly usable and highly scalable software and technology-based systems, Roy's experience and expertise encompass everything from user experience and user interface design to architecture, algorithms, and implementation. Roy has shipped more than twenty commercial products and services, including groundbreaking products in desktop productivity, word processing, tablet computers, web publishing, and educational software. He has provided user experience and development consulting services to a variety of companies, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small startup companies. Most of his consulting work focuses on user experience, where the breadth of his experience helps him to solve UI and UX problems quickly and efficiently, without requiring complete rewrites.

Roy serves as a mentor and advisor to a number of Seattle area entrepreneurs and startups. He holds monthly office hours at StartPad, where he provides free user experience consulting, mostly to startups, but also to the occasional established company. An avid supporter of the startup community, Roy is also the creator of SeattleTechCalendar, the shared, community-owned calendar for the Seattle tech community. He has given talks about user experience at Microsoft, StartPad, Ignite Seattle, and the Hackers Conference.

Roy has three blogs: thisUser, about user experience, design, and usability, thisDev, about entrepreneurship and creating software, and thisTangent, a personal blog about everything else. The author of one computer book and one puzzle book, his puzzles have been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, GAMES Magazine, and elsewhere.

In his spare time, he is a photographer, gourmet pizza maker, and ambigrammist.. He lives in Redmond, Washington, with his wife, two kids, six computers, three Nikons, and a pizza oven.

Blogs ...

	thisUser - design & usability
		thisDev - development & execution
			thisTangent - musings & speculation

Puzzazz - Puzzles with Pizzazz

• Designing and building great software that makes a difference in people's lives by making computer and technology-based products more enabling, easier to use, more transparent, and more powerful.
• Making technology in general more accessible.
• Building better user interfaces that act like people expect them to.
• I am available for consulting. If you have a product whose user interface is in need of help, I can make a big difference in a surprisingly short time. My consulting also includes architecture, algorithms, and development for systems of all sizes, from small to very large-scale.
• See my résumé here.

• Puzzles and puzzle construction (puzzles published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and GAMES magazine, among other places). I also create high-quality custom crosswords for individuals or companies. Contact me if you're interested.
• Ambigrams
• Photography (I'm also a big fan of Ansel Adams)
• Making pizzas (I have a partially-written cookbook I hope to finish one day)
• Former Chair of the Redmond Arts Commission for the City of Redmond, Washington
• Former Board Member and Board Chair for Bridges International Repertory Theatre of Seattle, Washington

Other interests ...

• Shakespeare
• Architecture (FrankLloyd Wright in particular).
• Some lamps that I designed and built.

My World Trade Center Memorial Proposal

• The proposal I submitted to the design competition [PDF]
  (the most interesting portions are the upper right and the lower left)
• My Ten-Year Memorial proposal
• Why it's so hard to know what's right
• An entrant's perspective on the competition
• Comments on the winning designs

Other links

• www.KristaLeeJohnson.com - A friend of mine from Minnesota, who is a wonderful oil painter (I did her website)
• www.TheBookOfLore.com - My sister-in-law, a simple web site for the novel she's working on (a much simpler site I did)

Originally ...