Irene Au

Picture of Irene Au. Copyright unknown.
Personal Homepage:
http://ireneau.com
Current place of employment:
Google

Irene Au is dedicated to raising the strategic value of design and user research within software companies through better methods and practices, processes, leadership, and quality. She is Director of User Experience at Google, where her team is responsible for design and user research for Google's products worldwide. Prior to Google, she spent eight years at Yahoo! where she was Vice President of User Experience and Design. At Yahoo!, Irene established the interaction design and user research practice, and led product and platform design efforts worldwide. Irene also headed up the Product Practices team which coached teams on Agile development practices and developed product operations programs to help business units deliver on corporate strategy. Prior to Yahoo!, Irene was at Netscape Communications, where she was an interaction designer and led cross-product design efforts on Netscape's browser, mail/news client, and page editor. Irene hold an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction through the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.

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Publications by Irene Au (bibliography)

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» 2008 «

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Rohrer, Christian, Au, Irene, Darnell, Elissa, Dickenson, Nancy, Evenson, Shelley and Kaasgaard, Klaus (2008): Design, marketing, strategy: where does user research belong?. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 2241-2244. Available online

In this interactive session, a panel of experts will discuss and debate an emerging and pressing issue: To have maximum impact on the user experience, how and where should a User Research team be structured within a corporation whose business depends on the development of successful interactive products through cross-functional collaboration? This has significant implications for organizations such as user experience, marketing, design, strategy, and academic programs preparing students entering corporate environments.

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Au, Irene, Boardman, Richard, Jeffries, Robin, Larvie, Patrick, Pavese, Antonella, Riegelsberger, Jens, Rodden, Kerry and Stevens, Molly (2008): User experience at Google: focus on the user and all else will follow. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 3681-3686. Available online

This paper presents an overview of the User Experience (UX) team at Google. We focus on four aspects of working within Google's product development organization: (1) a bottom-up 'ideas' culture, (2) a data-driven engineering approach, (3) a fast, highly iterative web development cycle, and (4) a global product perspective of designing for multiple countries. Each aspect leads to challenges and opportunities for the UX team. We discuss these, and outline some of the methodological approaches we employ to deal with them, along with some examples of our work.

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» 2001 «

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Au, Irene (2001): Industry briefs: Yahoo!. In Interactions, 8 (2) pp. 81-84

» 1998 «

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Au, Irene and Li, Shuang (1998): Netscape Communicator's Collapsible Toolbars. In: Karat, Clare-Marie, Lund, Arnold, Coutaz, Joëlle and Karat, John (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 98 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California. pp. 81-86. Available online

This paper describes the design process used for Netscape Communicator's collapsible toolbars. To meet our design goals, we designed a new widget whose roots came from objects in the "real world" instead of the "software world". The design of this widget illustrates how rapid prototyping and tight coupling between the visual design and interaction design are imperative to a widget's success.

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» 1995 «

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Sanderson, Penelope, Iozzo, Nick, Buberel, Jason and Au, Irene (1995): The Advising Workbench: Participation-Based Development of a Software Environment to Support Student Advising. In: Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 39th Annual Meeting 1995. pp. 1180-1184.

This paper describes the development, design, and evaluation of the Advising Workbench (AWB), a software development environment being developed at University of Illinois to support students, faculty, and professional advisors in the advising process. A participatory design strategy is being used with human factors design students taking part in the development of the AWB as researchers, designers, evaluators and, of course, as eventual users. Various systems-oriented conceptual tools have been used during the development of the AWB, such as hierarchical task analysis (HTA) and link analysis. Most notably, the AWB accesses University of Illinois course information from the World Wide Web (WWW). The AWB represents a test of many concepts, such as (1) the viability of tying student advising support to sources on the WWW, (2) the effectiveness of a large-scale participatory design exercise with human factors undergraduate students, and (3) the adequacy for naive users of our interpretation of the standard Macintosh interface. The AWB has excited considerable interest and support on campus, and early feedback from field testing is encouraging.

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Changes to this page (author)

19 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Irene Au's author page.
19 Sep 2008: Updated the picture of Irene Au
12 May 2008: Author was edited
12 May 2008: Author was edited
16 Sep 2007: Page was edited
11 Sep 2007: Updated the picture of Irene Au
27 Jun 2007: Author was edited
28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography

Publication statistics

Publication period:1995-2008
Publication count:5
Number of co-authors:16



Productive colleagues

Irene Au's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

Robin Jeffries:19
Penelope Sanderson:17
Jens Riegelsberger:16


Collaboration count

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

Patrick Larvie:1
Robin Jeffries:1
Richard Boardman:1

 

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Learn more about Irene Au:
- Google Scholar
- ACM
- CSB

Mar 12

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-- Don Norman

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