Greater Chicago Area
Impact-focused UX leader with global expertise currently managing Bold Insight. I believe experiences matter. For the past 25 years, my career has been focused on those four words. My work has centered around research that informs design to make products successful. This is not about "satisfaction," but what I call UX Adjectives and Adverbs. These are the words that evoke more tangible experiences, such as Intuitive, Engaging, Inspirational, Fun... These are the terms we want to hear about our product designs! This is where the bar should be! This requires pushing the UX envelope to new levels of design thinking. I lead a talented team with a management style that emphasizes openness, collaboration, and autonomy. [End of summary... see below if and only if you care to learn more about me] I cut my teeth in product development in the early 1990's under Arnie Lund at Ameritech. I managed experience (human factors back in the day) for products people used everyday. This is where I learned product development. I managed Voice Mail (consumer and business), Internet Caller ID, and a dozen business products under the Advanced Intelligent Network platform. What I loved was collaborating with product touch points that including, marketing, brand, billing, ordering, trouble resolution, and call center customer interactions to build the product experience. My next chapter founded a dotcom and then built a small consultancy called User Centric which grew into one of the largest UX firms around. I was able to experiment with novel UX techniques for companies like Verizon Wireless, Abbott, Motorola, and even the San Francisco Giants! This small consultancy grew and hit Inc's 5000 Fastest Growing Companies List six consecutive years and we sold to GfK. After growing another 150%, I moved on in Dec 2017. I hope that my final chapter is to create consultancy that lives on in its employees!
Role at Bold Insight has evolved to emphasize the #EmployeeOwnership model for its ReSight Global UX companies. At Bold Insight, Partners are shareholders of the business and charged with fostering long-term growth for employees. The goal for the team is to create careers and not simply ‘jobs’.
Honored to launch a new global ux consultancy that focuses on clients first with a team of smart and passionate superstars! Bold Insight, an employee-owned company. Bold Insight is a user experience consulting practice based in the Chicago area that offers its UX researchers and designers the opportunity to work with some of the coolest next-generation products out there. We partner with our clients to inform the design of best-in-class experiences, and we have a great time doing it! We value curiosity, creativity, ambition, and an entrepreneurial flair. We also believe in our employees. We have a culture that promotes empowerment, creativity and accountability – focused on doing what’s right for our clients, our employees, our company, and our world. We are employee-owned, and our vision is for every long-term member of our team to share in the success they help create.
Bold Insight is a part of ReSight Global's family of companies. Our UX and human factors research agencies in China, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States offer a broad set of tools and methods that help you to improve the user experience of your product.
Teaching graduate course: Health Comm HCI-455 Winter 2019 (Jan - Mar 2019) Course Summary This course describes a wide array of methods for evaluating the user experience of products and interfaces. We will discuss and practice methods such as heuristic and expert evaluations, cognitive walkthroughs, exploratory, ethnographies, usability testing (formative and summative), surveys, eye tracking, contextual inquiries and hybrid focus groups. Goals to learn how to: • Understand the reasons for and roles for usability evaluation • Establish appropriate evaluation objectives • Select evaluation methods that address evaluation objectives and consider existing constraints • Articulate advantages and disadvantages of usability evaluation methods • Properly use various usability evaluation methods • Present results and prepare effective report Course is within the School of Professional Studies.
Adjunct faculty member of DePaul University where I teach a graduate-level course on UX evaluation methods (HCI-460). ◆ About once a year (and sometimes twice), I teach a course that was pitched to me as "Gavin, this course is something you do every single day..." ◆ Constructed the course with lessons from my experience that ended up producing over 33 hours of lecture on UX techniques with about 1200-1500 slides of material (before you get alarmed, so much was taken from keynotes and lectures over the years that the material is mostly graphics/image-based, so not all words!) ◆ Example course syllabus: http://www.usercentric.com/hci460-fall2009.html
Faculty member of the Feinberg School of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine/Geriatrics. ◆ My role is to provide UX expertise in the Health--specifically Electronic Health Records and Technology in Health. Consulted on research methodologies for Northwestern studies. ◆ Position was established within CHITREC.org (Chicago Health Information and Technology Regional Extension Center), which is a $7m grant under Obama's HITECH Healthcare Act in 2009. ◆ Emphasis is to gain insight via research into the design of electronic health records (EHR) systems to improve Meaningful Use associated with the HITECH Act.