Services Overview
I have been a UX researcher, strategist, and business development specialist for twenty years. My consulting work incorporates a broad array of industries including automotive, banking, consumer, education, engineering, financial, FinTech, government, healthcare, insurance, media, online, pharmaceutical, retail, technology, telecommunications, and not-for-profit verticals.
I’m committed to helping you envision, evaluate, and build products and services that reflect human-centered design best practices and that exceed business goals. Towards this end, I offer a variety of proven techniques and capabilities as described below.
In addition to these, the most interesting project or technique may be one that hasn’t been invented yet! I enjoy collaborating to envision new approaches for bringing impactful order to challenging and complex interaction and product/service design opportunities.
Orienteering and Strategy
A seasoned, collaborative outside perspective can be invaluable for helping your organization figure out what to do next, understand “Design Thinking,” or apply human-centered design practices to your organization and your customers’ best advantage. I can help you take an unbiased look at your organization’s goals, processes, and products for the purposes of road mapping pathways to success. Specific services include:
- Human-Centered Design and User Experience Needs Assessment
- Strategy / Activity Road mapping
- Statement of Work development
- Tactical Consultant Team Building
Benchmarking and Validation
Usability and user-needs research studies are mainstays of successful human-centered products and services. I draw upon decades of experience to design and execute un-biased and highly effective research activities across the spectrum of techniques. I’ve conducted research across product types: mobile applications, websites, software, medical devices, assistive technologies, automotive head units, human services, and more. Conducting research with assistive technology users and persons with disabilities is a specialty. My research techniques include, but are not limited to:
- Ethnographic research
- Focus Groups
- In-depth Interviews
- Heuristic Evaluations (Expert Review)
- Lab- and field-based usability research
- User Needs Research
- Usability and Accessibility Testing
- Usability Techniques (affinity diagraming, card sorts, content audits, persona generation, journey mapping, taxonomy definition, wireframing)
Business Development Consulting
A significant portion of my career has involved business development activities that have brought millions of dollars to the consultancies I’ve worked with. As a result, I’ve come to enjoy not only advocating for UX and human-centered design practices, but identifying clients, managing client accounts, helping clients to define activity approaches, and representing UX and human-centered design perspectives in meetings and at conferences for clients who have nascent (or no) internal capabilities in these areas. Specific skills include:
- Account Direction
- Client Management
- Grant Writing
- Lead Generation
- Relationship Building
- Statement of Work / Contract Writing
- UX Representation
Facilitation
Far from being a solo operator, I greatly enjoy crafting collaborative engagements that bring your innovators, teams, and core constituents together in systematic ways. I can collaborate with you to plan and facilitate a wide variety of engagement types, including:
- Collaborative Design Sessions
- Design Studios
- Focus Groups
- In-depth Interviews
- Research Moderation
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Training / Workshops
Thought Leadership
Shared knowledge is essential to success. I am a frequent guest lecturer to graduate and undergraduate university programs, a national and international presenter at industry conferences, and have given several hundred talks, trainings, and workshops on a wide variety of strategic and tactical topics. I am available to speak to audiences from the “trenches” of research, design, and development work, to board rooms and the “ivory towers” of academia.
- Talks
- Training / Workshops