Ben Sykes is a dev / design hybrid with a focus on interaction (IxD), user experience (UX) and behavior design. He has always had a strong desire to tell stories, and started out in Hollywood working in TV & film on such projects as Melrose Place, American Beauty, and Murder In The First. In the mid 1990’s, Ben started a web design consultancy and worked on a variety of projects with Warner Brothers Music, Artisan Entertainment, Digital Evolution just to name a few. In 2003, he joined the Marine Corps Reserves and was deployed to Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Upon his return, he continued to design and develop with such companies as : Oversee.net, American Idol Underground, NSA, NASA, & Oracle. More recently, Ben has worked with Microsoft, where he led multiple UX initiatives; Cisco where he managed and built the Irish UX team and helped integrate WebEx / CUPC; and Google where he was a lead designer on the AdWords team and was instrumental in the creation of multiple features such as the DisplayTargeting Tab, Alerts, and Google Help. He then went on to lead the design of the big data visualization of self-service dashboards backed by the Google Data Warehouse. Ben currently serves as a User Experience Design Advisor to multiple start-ups and has been designing & facilitating the curriculum for the Apprentice Program and Job Search Standup for General Assembly’s UX Design Immersive students as well as teaching Interaction Design at San Francisco State University.