Cambridge Usability Group

Stuart Church

Stuart runs his own web usability and accessibility consultancy, Pure Usability Ltd. Much of his work has been in the areas of e-learning and education. This work has encompassed a wide range of development projects including portals, virtual learning environments, learning materials, content management systems, community websites, static websites, authoring tools and online games. Stuart also teaches User-Centred Design and Information Architecture as part of the Diploma in Web Design and Development course at Birkbeck College, University of London.

In his previous life, Stuart was a lecturer and researcher in Animal Behaviour, Psychology and Biostatistics at the Universities of Bristol and Southampton. He has a PhD in Animal Behaviour from the University of Southampton.

In his spare time, he likes to relax by taking photographs and playing guitar. He likes to not relax by following the fortunes of Brighton and Hove Albion FC. And despite living in Cambridge for more than three years, he's still amazed by how flat it is.

[If you want to post your details on the Cambridge Usability Group site, email cambridge.usability@gmail.com]

Carl Myhill

Carl Myhill is the Head of User Experience for GE Energy's Network Reliability Products and Services division. He moved to Cambridge 8 years ago as the first Interaction Designer for Smallworld, a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) company, where he eventually got the opportunity to lead the redesign of the Smallworld flagship product (called 'The Core'), with a fantastic team. GE acquired Smallworld several years ago and it becaome merged with other GE businesses in Scotland, Florida, Calgary, Denver and Sweden to form NRPS.

Carl now leads a global team of 22 people, some are Interaction Designers, some are Technical Writers but a significant number are Design Communicators (Technical Writers now heavily involved in design). The make-up of NRPS design teams and the design process used are based on the Cooper way of working. Both the team structure and Goal-Directed Design(TM) have been extremely effective at NRPS with Personas, Scenarios and Paper Prototyping routine.

Carl has a PhD in Applied Psychology (Human-Computer Interaction) and a Masters in Artifical Intelligence from Cranfield University, and a BSc in Mathematics for Business from Middlesex University. He still writes the odd paper on User Experience for fun, because he can't leave it alone - see www.litsl.com.

For fun, Carl builds accessible websites and likes to diddle around with xhtml, CSS and that sort of thing.

[If you want to post your details on the Cambridge Usability Group site, email cambridge.usability@gmail.com]

Say hello!

One of the aims of the Cambridge Usability Group is to bring people together. But before we can do that we have to know who people are! So we'd like to invite anyone working in usability or related disciplines in the Cambridge/East Anglia area to send us a brief bio and statement of your interests (and maybe a picture as well, if you're feeling brave) and we'll put it on the blog. You'll then be able to view a list of everyone who's posted a bio under the "People" category.

You can email your contributions to cambridge.usability@gmail.com.

Tom Wood

Tom Wood is a managing partner of Foolproof. Based in Norwich, we are the UK UPA's most eastern outpost.

My academic and professional careers have been focused on sales and marketing. I was fascinated by consumer reaction to sales messages during my undergraduate years at Brighton Polytechnic Business School and then during my post-graduate Diploma in Marketing. I worked at a number of advertising and marketing agencies during the early 90's before moving to Norfolk to join Virgin Money to run their advertising department. At Virgin I was able to apply my experience of conducting market research to the nascent web sales channel. The effect of applying usability and user-centred design techniques to online sales and marketing were so profound I started my own company...

In its third year Foolproof now has 12 staff and a client list that reflects our specialism in improving online sales performance for Financial Services companies. Other members of the team include my business partner Peter Ballard and Tim Loo who is a committee member of the UK UPA.