"It's exciting when my designs change people's lives by helping them work better."

User reseach, usability evaluation, plain language, information architecture
...with a user-centered approach

Contact

Whitney Quesenbery
78 Washington Avenue
High Bridge, NJ 08829

whitneyq at wqusability dot com
phone: 908-638-5467
www.WQusability.com

• Resume
• LinkedIn profile
• Projects portfolio
• Awards and recognitions

Biography

Whitney Quesenbery is a user researcher, user experience practitioner, and usability expert with a passion for clear communication. She has been in the field since 1989, helping companies from The Open University to Sage Software to the National Cancer Institute develop usable web sites and applications.

She is the director of the UPA Usability in Civic Life project and has been appointed to the US Elections Assistance Commission's guidelines development committee, where she works to ensure the usability of voting systems. She represented UPA on an Advisory Committee for the Access Board (TEITAC), working to update US accessibility regulations.

She has served as the President of UPA (Usability Professionals' Association), Manager of the STC Usability and User Experience (UUX), and a member of the Executive Committee for UXNet, as well as an active participant in local usability groups. In 2005 she was given the STC President's Award for her work on communities in membership organizations, and in 2007, she was honored with a UPA President's Award and as a Fellow of the STC.

Her most recent publication is a chapter on “Storytelling and Narrative” in The Personas Lifecycle, by Pruitt and Adlin. She’s also proud that one of her articles won an award as a Society for Technical Communication (STC) Outstanding Journal Article, and that her chapter “Dimensions of Usability” in Content and Complexity turns up on so many course reading lists. She is currently working on a book on Storytelling in User Experience Design for Rosenfeld Media

As a principal at Cognetics Corporation for 12 years, she was instrumental in building a great design staff, and the design leader for many design and usability projects. Her project credits there include work with companies such as Novartis, Deloitte Consulting, Lucent, McGraw-Hill, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, and Dow Jones. While at Cognetics, she was one of the developers of LUCID (Logical User-Centered Interaction Design), which promotes the importance of a user-centered approach and usability in design.

Her projects have won many awards in industry competitions, but the two she is proudest of are the 1996 Best of Show in the STC International Online Competition for a multimedia CD-ROM on the benefits of non-traditional documentation for AT&T/Lucent and the 2001 Frank R. Smith Outstanding Journal Article for "On Beyond Help - User Assistance and the User Interface" in STC's Technical Communication journal.

Background

Her early work at Cognetics centered around Hyperties, a pre-Web hypertext program. She earned her credit as a technical writer on the user manual, and designed reference databases, online books, safety manuals and the HP Laser-Jet 4 online documentation. Her work with large information sets, especially her work on library reference CD-ROMs for The Gale Group, Primary Source Media and Macmillan Library Reference, gave her practical experience in search and structuring information for easy access.

Before she discovered user-centered design, she worked as a theatrical lighting designer on drama, dance and opera both off-Broadway and in the regional theatres. Some of her favorite productions were Poppie Nongena, a South-African musical theatre hit, Brecht's A Man's A Man with Bill Murray and assisting on Laurie Anderson's United States I-IV. She taught lighting for several years at Bard College, where she developed her skills in on-the-job mentoring.

She was in the first generation of people trained on computer boards, and thought that all computers were carefully designed to fit the needs of those who worked with them. Her first experience with personal computers was as a domain expert and developer for a theatrical lighting data management system for the Apollo Theatre in New York.

Whitney graduated from Bryn Mawr College. She comes by her interest in information, language, and design honestly, as the daughter of a librarian and an English professor.