Paul Sawyer

Current place of employment:
Consultant/Contractor

Paul Sawyer began at Nuance in early 2004 after working as a lead designer on the speech-activated personal assistant at Wildfire for two years. Before that, Paul served for over a decade as a consultant on usability and interaction design at Digital Equipment Corp.,Sun Microsystems, Media 100, and User Interface Engineering. He received a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and spent many years in software product development before moving into usability, human factors, and interaction design. He is presently working as an independent consultant in the areas of speech UI, and general usability for speech or screen.

At Nuance, Paul was the principal designer on projects for Independence Air(flight information, schedules, fares, reservations), Cox Communications(automated customer service), and the U.S. Social Security Administration(automated address change and direct deposit, and SpeakFreely main call router). Paul has consulted on projects for US Airways, United Airlines, Pepco (electric utility), and MassMutual (investment and retirement services).

Whether as a designer or a reviewer / consultant, Paul is a strong advocate for the ultimate user, believing that high caller satisfaction reduces cost and improves a company's reputation with its customers.

Publications by Paul Sawyer (bibliography)

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» 1996 «

Sawyer, Paul, Flanders, Alicia and Wixon, Dennis (1996): Making a Difference -- The Impact of Inspections. In: Tauber, Michael J., Bellotti, Victoria, Jeffries, Robin, Mackinlay, Jock D. and Nielsen, Jakob (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 96 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 14-18, 1996, Vancouver, Canada. pp. 376-382. Available online

Changes to this page (author)

26 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Paul Sawyer's author page.
10 Aug 2007: Page was edited