Thyra.Rauch

Bio:

Thyra, who has worked at IBM for over 27 years, currently works on B2B solutions as a user research lead. Thyra has used a variety of methodologies, such as contextual inquiry, task analysis, requirements gathering, and story-gathering. She has been instrumental in validating product and UI direction, user roles, and role/task pairings across a number of different industries for multiple product solutions, and she uses customer stories from ethnographic research as an integral part of her design process. She believes that ethnographic research is critical to good design and purpose-made solutions, but has had to adapt the techniques to an Agile/Lean UX experience. One of the things that she has noticed in the past year or so is the overall lack of understanding of the role of ethical behavior and it's role in user research across many of the teams she has been in contact with. Coming from an academic background that was grounded in ethical standards and a professional code of conduct, she finds this concerning to the future of UX. She has a Ph.D. in experimental psychology and has taught university courses on UX. She has been actively involved with UXPA for many years.