Time: 4pm, Tuesday Feb 13
Place: 202 Soda Hall
Abstract

   Real-world HCI: Building a User Experience practice at an Internet 
                     professional services firm

                    Alex Wright, Liquid Thinking

Alex Wright, VP of User Experience at Liquid Thinking, will talk about 
his experiences building User Experience teams at three different Web 
development organizations over the past five years - Liquid Thinking, 
Phoenix Pop, and IBM.com.  He will talk about the challenges and 
lessons of developing a UE practice at a Web services firm, where time 
and budget pressures often force teams to make intelligent trade-offs 
in development process, and to constantly find effective ways of 
selling their clients on the business value of user-centered design.

Bio

Alex Wright is VP of User Experience at Liquid Thinking, a San 
Francisco-based Internet services firm.  Previously, he was VP of User 
Experience at Phoenix Pop, where he built a successful User Experience 
practice of 10 professionals within an integrated Web professional 
services company.  Before coming to Phoenix Pop, Alex was Senior 
Manager of User Experience at IBM.com, where he managed worldwide 
design and information architecture standards for IBM's company-wide 
Web presence.  Alex's project credits include Adobe, Spotlife, id8 
Group, Epylon, ibm.com, Deep Blue vs. Kasparov (winner of the 1997 Cool 
Site of the Year award), the 1996 Olympic Games, the National Education 
Summit, and the first www.harvard.edu site.  Alex's speaking credits 
include ASIS&T, Web2000, AIP, the Institute of Design, Chicago, and 
numerous IBM conferences.  Alex holds an M.S. in Library & Information 
Science from Simmons College and a B.A. in English and American 
Literature from Brown.  He has also completed graduate coursework in 
usability engineering at Berkeley.