About User Experience Design

User Experience Design is the trading name for Carl Myhill's Cambridge-based Usability Consulting and Website Services.

Carl's Biography

Work

Carl Myhill of User Experience Design

Carl has worked in the field of usability for 15 years. Until this year he was the Head of User Experience for an $800 million division of General Electric called Network Reliability Products and Services (NRPS). He moved to Cambridge 10 years ago as the first Interaction Designer for Smallworld, a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) company, where he eventually got the opportunity to lead the re-design of the Smallworld flagship product with a fantastic team. GE acquired Smallworld in 2000 and NRPS was formed as it was merged with other GE businesses in Scotland, Florida, Calgary, Denver and Sweden. Carl's global team of 22 included Interaction Designers, Technical Writers and Design Communicators. The team was extremely successful with the Cooper Goal-Directed Design approach (involving Personas, Scenarios and Paper prototyping). When an ISO auditor said, "this is way beyond any best practice I have ever seen!", we knew we were on to something.

Projects

Carl's projects have included: Water Resource Allocation Planning (WRAP) for Yorkshire Water Operations; Re-design of the Smallworld Core Geographic Information System (GIS) and the Design of a spatial analysis application called 'Spatial Intelligence' (SI). Of course, he didn't do these things alone - he worked with great teams!

Involvement with Usability Community

In 2005, along with Stuart Church, Carl founded the Cambridge Usability Group (part of the Usability Professionals Association). Prior to that, Carl made the first presentation to the Christchurch UPA Group in New Zealand.

Websites

In 2003 Carl got his teeth into building websites when he built one for Impington Swimming Club. Already a useful learning experience, this became enlightening when one swimmers, Ian Sharpe (Sharpy), made some some positive comments about the website. This was only surprising because Sharpy is blind, in fact, he is a phenomenal swimmer, indeed, a silver medalist in the Paralympics at 100 Butterfly with a time of 1:02:05 (you should really see Sharpy swimming fly!). Sharpy's comments made Carl really start to learn a lot more about Accessibility and how to make websites accessible to anyone, even incredible swimmers!

Since then, Carl has gone on to build lots more websites. Although he never planned it to happen, they are all easy to find in Google because they are simple, well structured, validated and accessible.

Education

Carl has a PhD in Applied Psychology (Human-Computer Interaction), a Masters in Artifical Intelligence from Cranfield University and a BSc in Mathematics for Business from Middlesex University. He still write the occasional conference paper.

Resume / CV

Carl's full resume is available as a Word document.