USER CENTRED DESIGN EXPERTS JOIN USER VISION

User Vision has announced the appointment of Rob van Tol and Clare Barnett to its growing team.

Both champions of user centred design, Rob will take on the role of Senior User Experience Consultant with Clare becoming the newest User Experience Consultant at User Vision.

In his role, Rob will undertake classic usability work as well as new techniques and technologies, such as the recent introduction of iMotions, the eye-tracking software that measures emotion.

As User Experience Consultant, Clare will work closely with a number of clients including BBC and the Training Development Agency, carrying out usability testing, accessibility audits and will work to secure new business.

Rob previously worked with Cable and Wireless as part of a team that unified hundreds of intranets into one single intranet. Most recently he worked for Harrogate Council as Information and Website manager. In this role he oversaw the council homepage and, despite there only being 170,000 residents, successfully led an increase in visitor numbers to almost one million a month.

Rob is thrilled to be joining User vision: “Working with big companies in the past I’ve always tried to promote user centred design because of the many benefits it brings not only the website users, but also the website owners. Now I’m finally with a team of experts who ‘get’ what I’ve have been talking about for over 15 years, and are already delivering those benefits to so many established clients.”

After graduating from Glasgow University with an MA in Psychology and Politics, Clare began her career at Standard Life as Communications Consultant working in graphic design and desktop publishing. Appointed to the web design team she ran the Standard Life website as well as designing and implementing internal applications such as programming for call centre employees.

Firmly believing in the value of user centred design, Clare worked to change perceptions organising awareness sessions demonstrating the benefit of introducing it into the first stages of development. She was eventually successful in getting user centred design introduced into the Standard Life design guidelines.

Clare says: “With 10 years experience in a large financial organisation I have a strong background in web design and also learnt and promoted user centred design. I could see working with User Vision would develop these strengths and also allow me to work with a wide range of different exciting clients.”