Ghostweather
Research & Design

I'm a Boston-based user experience design consultant with 12 years industry and research experience in interface design, customer research, and usability. Specialties:

• interaction design (wireframes, Powerpoint, Axure...)
• customer interviews and observation for requirements discovery (ethnography or contextual inquiry), optionally including video
• data analysis (surveys, web logs, statistics, cluster analysis for personas)
• online community design (a recent talk I gave lives here)
• usability methods as part of the design process
• help setting up design processes and hiring in your organization

For more information and portfolio, send me email!

Recommendations (see full profile on LinkedIn):

"Lynn is brilliant. She understands the underpinnings of Ux and community design so well she can bend the rules to get superior results. She is thoughtful and decisive. Her experienced input guided us around potential roadblocks on many occasions. Without hesitation, I would recommend her services to any organization that wants to win with customer-centric design."

"In a 3 day project, Lynn was able to absorb the objectives and target audience of our service, earn the trust of the engineers, designers, and product mangers, and recommend important design corrections. Several months later those mid course user experience and design corrections are still spot on, and still being followed. Lynn was especially strong at knowing the fundamentals of good UE design for a consumer internet end user audience.”

"Lynn is highly professional, knowledgeable and experienced in her domain, very well-organized, a hard-worker who aims at only top quality deliverables."

Presentations I can give at a moment's notice:

• Design for Online Community: Past the Hype
• Building a Quality Product and Experience at TiVo
• LiveJournal Community and the Spread of "Memes"
• Fan Video Editing Communities: Pre-and-Post Internet Era
• So You Want to Be a UI Designer...?
• So You're Thinking About Consulting? Think About This...

Previous Work Experience

• Autodesk (Waltham, MA): Till January 07, I was the manager of a small interaction design team. We worked on Revit, a 3d architectural parametric design platform. I instituted many of our design and usability processes and personally performed quantitative and qualitative data analysis to inform design: analysing product usage patterns, survey creation and data analysis, and product performance measurements including customer perception data.
• The Mathworks (Natick, MA): From roughly 2004 to 2006, as Principal Usability Specialist at the Mathworks, I worked on bioinformatics, data vis, and simulation products (usability, user research, design).
• Adobe Systems (Seattle and San Jose): I designed user interface ("UI") features for the Creative Suite applications, meaning InDesign, Photoshop, Acrobat, InCopy, Illustrator. Specifically I worked on color management and PDF features, as well as miscellaneous other problems. My work shipped in CS2.
• Axance.com (Paris, France): Axance is a usability consulting company in France. As Director of Methodology, I was responsible for oversight of client proposals, especially international jobs involving subcontracting in other countries. I helped expand the company consulting business into design work as well as more usability evaluation methods.
• TiVo (Alviso, CA): Hired as a user interface designer, I ended up manager of UI and usability for a brief time before I moved to France. Two years later, I was back as a consultant for a few months, before I took a job at Adobe in Seattle.
• Excite (later Excite@Home) (Redwood City, CA): One of the first UI designers there, I worked on complex web applications (mail, planner, invites) and consulted internally on chat and community products. My products were very well received by our users (you can see some images in the portfolio examples).
• AT&T Labs (Morristown, NJ): Hired by Bell Labs into an HCI research group, I moved with them to AT&T Labs when it spun off. I worked on online community, games, chat interfaces for 3 years before leaving research to build shipping products!

In grad school and at AT&T Labs (formerly Bell Labs), I studied internet communities and chat systems and looked a bit at computer games. If anyone knows my name, it's probably because of my papers about MUDs and the books.

Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, Seal Press, 1996. Co-edited with Elizabeth Reba Weise.

Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World, CSLI/U of Chicago, 1999. A revised version of my dissertation from Stanford University, one of the first in-depth social and socio-linguistic studies of an online chat community with customizable environment (like many online games now). Includes ethics discussion and overview of socio- and anthro- definitions of the concept of "community."

After a long time and many broken links, I've resurrected and uploaded my old MUD and research papers: Lynn's Papers.

I've got a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics; an M.Phil. from Cambridge University in Computer Speech and Language Processing; and a B.A. from University of Maryland in Linguistics.

I studied a lot of speech recognition, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing while I was in school. I worked at SRI in California during grad school and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (the speech group) in Maryland.