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Carol Righi

After end-to-end schooling, all the way through a PhD in psychology, Carol Righi scooted to Israel to get some perspective. She came back to work at IBM during a very exciting time for user-centered design; one of her first projects was working on making operating systems invisible. Want some cognitive dissonance? She recruited IBM usability test participant…on the beach during spring break! Back in the offices, she was part of a movement to build a multidisciplinary approach to product design, breaking down the silos between design, development, and documentation. She went on to write a book full of case studies of real projects, which helps express her conviction that a multidisciplinary approach is the way to go if you want to build great products. Today, she is fascinated with helping newbies navigate through their careers, so that they can enjoy working in our field as much as she has.

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Excerpts From the Interview

[The early 90's, when we were working on OS/2,] was a great time at IBM. We were very enthusiastic about our prospects for beating Microsoft because we knew we had the better product. Even some of our friends at Microsoft told us so. Unfortunately having the better product doesn't mean you're going to win in the marketplace. That was another huge lesson for me: There is a lot more to user experience than just the quality of the solution. There's so much more that comes with it.

At IBM, We also did a lot of things that bordered on market research. We would go out to the malls and the beaches - we were in south Florida; why not? We would do preference testing of icons and preference testing of different names for products and features. We discovered that there is sometimes a fine line between market research and user research from a user experience perspective, but also learned how much they complement each other, and how important they all are to the bigger picture. We tried to move further away from just thinking about back end usability testing and more toward front end, building things that people want in the first place.

More About Carol Righi

Carol Righi is the Director of User Experience for Perficient's St. Louis Business Unit. Carol has worked in the area of user experience and User-Centered Design for more than 20 years. Carol has worked on projects across the industry for companies such as IBM, Google, Yahoo, Intuit, A. G. Edwards, Mapquest, Met Life, and many others. Past positions have included consultant for IBM's Global Services; Manager of Usability for IBM's Personal Software Products division; Manager of Academic User Services at Teachers College, Columbia University; Guest Lecturer at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel; and various other positions in consulting and educational services.