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.

This year I took a work break to enjoy time with my lovely newborn baby Alina. Now I am looking forward to coming back to UX world and working on new and exciting projects.

My recents projects at Tweddle and Nuance include interaction design and user research of support website for vehicle manufactures to assist customers, Dragon Drive website for use in auto shows, and Yelp in-car app for Chrysler. For some projects I also acted as a product owner, creating user stories and facilitating 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 agile team that worked on Dragon Drive. We worked closely with visual designers and developers reviewing each others work on daily basis and tweaking designs to achieve the best design given short timeframes. I introduced the practice of usability studies and led 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 Dragon Drive in car app and prepared reports contributing to designs that are safer for driving. I also facilitated surveys and creation of a user journey for future Dragon Drive products. 

At BlackBerry I was responsible of UX design and research for all email setup channels (web, mobile app, customer support site) and BlackBerry Universal Device Service that allows IT departments to manage employee's 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 some many things we 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 team they have much better chance catching what works, what doesn't work and making optimizations.

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

Human me