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Laura Dove is a designer and engineer with over eight years of experience in a broad range of environments. Combining this background with her usability expertise, she has refined an ability to rapidly understand the critical dynamics of an ongoing development effort, pinpoint fundamental issues, and identify the specific areas that offer opportunities for improvement. Partnering with clients Laura achieves process efficiencies, producing substantial cost savings. Deliberately collaborative at all levels; she nurtures an understanding of values and benefits, which engenders the cooperative support so necessary for successful design. Clients speak of her as an enthusiastic, creative, and a caring person who is persistent and achieves results.

Laura has a proven record of success in reaching project objectives through ingenuity and business acumen coupled with effective abilities in the areas of usability engineering, graphic design, interaction design and project management. Desired outcomes are realized through her ability to move beyond chaos to clearly identify needs, and carefully tailor the appropriate solution.

Laura’s corporate and not-for-profit experience began with WGN / Tribune Entertainment, and continued at University of Chicago, DePaul University, Illinois College of Optometry, and Rockwell Software working closely with clients such as Eli Lilly, Kraft, Nabisco, Kimberly Clarke, HK Systems, and professional sports teams and celebrities. At Rockwell, she pioneered some of the firm’s first user-centered design initiatives to involve end users in the definition of next-generation products and accelerated the specification, design, and development process.

She completed her Master of Science with distinction in Human Computer Interaction at the Center for Telecommunications and Information Systems, DePaul University in Chicago, and holds a BA in Studio Art and Museum Studies. Laura is a member of ACM’s SIG CHI, including local MilwauCHI chapter, and The International Usability Professionals Association.

Pervasive Usability &

The Spiral Model of Software Development

	Validation Field Testing [sample] Alpha / Beta Testing [sample] Competitive User Testing Stress Testing
Production Style Guides UI Toolkits Iterative Design		Requirements Gathering Interviews Field Studies Focus Groups Requirements Analysis Task Analysis Cognitive Modeling
	Design Evaluation Design Generation User Testing Information Architecture Usability Inspection [sample] Brainstorming UCD Methods [sample] Prototyping Mockups [sample]

This model is a high level representation of a parallel software design process. Research has shown that products developed iteratively with proactive user design and feedback mechanisms significantly outperform their standard counterparts. For example, IBM saved six million dollars on an internal system by spending sixty thousand on early usability architecting.

The HCI professional aids development efficiency and productivity by working slightly downstream from the rest of the team. Usability architects capture, map out, and feed system and user requirements to the team as needed. Many factors such as resource, schedule, scope, milestone priorities, company policy, and team culture affect the architect's hand-off mechanisms. Follow these links to learn more and sample various deliverable documents.