Anna Rouben

Professional me

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I am a user experience designer and researcher living in Seattle. My background is in human computer interaction and human factors.  I have extensive experience doing both user research and interaction design for web, mobile, and in-car products. I believe in working with collaborative, motivated, and agile teams that are excited to create usable and beautiful products. I love products that don't make people think... at least when they don't want to be thinking.

Currently I work as a lead UX designer at ProQuest focusing on products for librarians and researchers.

My projects at Tweddle and Nuance include interaction design and user research on a support website for vehicle manufactures to assist customers, the Dragon Drive website for use in auto shows, and the Yelp in-car app for Chrysler. For some projects I also acted as a product owner, creating user stories and facilitating the agile process. I worked closely with other UX designers and visual designers to collaborate and review our work.

I really enjoyed being an integrated part of the agile team that worked on Dragon Drive. We worked closely with visual designers and developers reviewing each others' work on a daily basis and tweaking designs to achieve the best design in a short timeframe. I introduced the practice of usability studies and led the creation of a driving simulator lab. (I am glad people don't drive the same on the streets as they drive in the lab; most of the stop signs in the city would be missing.) I conducted usability studies for the Dragon Drive in-car app and prepared reports contributing to designs that are safer for driving. I also facilitated surveys and the creation of a user journey for future Dragon Drive products. 

At BlackBerry I was responsible for UX design and user research for email setup across all channels (web, mobile app, customer support site) and for the BlackBerry Universal Device Service that allows IT departments to manage employees' Androids and iPhones. My user research work included fun days listening to customer support calls where I learned that some people still think that cookies can only be eaten. While digging through the notes after usability studies is not the most exciting job, it always makes you glad that you did another study because there are also many things to be learned. I created easily accessible and modifiable interaction design specifications using Axure that were used by agile teams. I was part of the agile team that collaborated closely and attended daily standups. I believe working in-sync with developers is essential for creating high quality designs. When designers work closely with the development team there's a much better chance of catching what does & doesn't work, and it's far easier to make on-the-fly optimizations.

During my grad school years at the University of Minnesota I spent time working on non-speech audio navigation. I wanted to see if we could guide people to a destination using sound without a voice, and to investigate whether non-speech audio requires less cognitive load for users. I both developed the system and conducted experiments. I also worked on an interesting wikipedia project and a location-sensitive notification system. That was before iPhones even existed, so please don't be horrified by the beauty of my visuals. In addition to research work I tutored a user-centered design class that included leading meetings with students to track and guide the design and research deliverables for their projects.

Human me