I am an independent User Experience consultant, helping my clients improve the usability and utility of their products. I specialize in user research and interaction design. My current consulting clients include Slideshare, MyNextCustomer, Socialtext, Hearsay, Project Slice, and CBR. As well as providing a range of UX services, I also dabble in engineering. When I’m not consulting, I’m a UX Advisor at the 500 Startups tech accelerator.
I received my PhD in 2004 from Imperial College London in the field of Human Computer Interaction. My research explored the problems people encounter when trying to stay on top of all the personal information they amass on their personal computing devices, such as documents, email, bookmarks, contacts and so on. Based on my research, I developed a tool called WorkspaceMirror which synchronized folder hierarchies across a user’s file, email and bookmark collections. Some of my evaluators – those who liked to organize their stuff – found it quite helpful.
After my PhD, I worked at Google for 5 years in the User Experience team. There I was lead User Experience Researcher on Google Adwords and Google Chrome, both conducting research and managing other researchers. Google is a busy place and I also worked on Google Toolbar, Google Pack, Adwords Editor, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, Accessibility, Google Search, GMail, Maps, Froogle, Mobile, Google Accounts, Google Desktop, and a bunch of stuff which doesn’t exist any more.
Further back, I received a BEng in Computer Systems Engineering from Imperial College London (1995), spent 3 years as software engineer at a Swiss investment bank. Before that I designed and built my own transputer-based computer at Inmos. Hence I know my awk from my sed. I continue to keep my hands dirty in the coding trenches, and take pride in being a researcher who understands engineering speak.
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