User Experience Design + Leadership

My Managers...

“Elaine is a world class user experience professional. She is the rare UX professional with both excellent design skills and leadership ability. Her design strength is taking large, unstructured problems and creating straightforward, intuitive mental models and interaction designs. From a management standpoint she keeps her team well organized and attracts and retains talented designer professionals. I highly recommend her.” 

David Knight, Vice President Product Management & Platforms, managed Elaine at Cisco WebEx

 

“Elaine has been a staff member at my company, and she has been a client champion on consulting projects. So I've seen her from two sides. Elaine has the kind of poise, intelligence, and good humor required to herd all the cats that get involved in complex interaction design initiatives. She's a visionary designer herself, with plenty of time spent mucking about in the details. She's also a methodologist and an effective manager of creative/technical professionals. Two thumbs up!” 

David Fore, VP Consulting Services managed Elaine at Cooper Interaction Design 
 

“Elaine was a creative powerhouse at Cooper! Bringing both creative, out-of-box thinking to her projects, as well as a grounded, research-based approach, Elaine was consistently able to develop unique and value-added concepts for our clients and take them through the rigors of detailed design execution. Elaine was, and is, a star performer!”

Robert Reimann, Director of Design R&D, managed Elaine at Cooper Interaction Design

 

“Elaine is a sparky, talented designer who has generated great solutions for everything from telematics (in-vehicle entertainment and navigation) to complex software. Elaine is a good collaborator and a pleasure to work with. Her professionalism, skill, and clear communication always inspired confidence in her clients and teammates.” 

Kim Goodwin, VP & GM, managed Elaine at Cooper Interaction Design

 

“I worked with Elaine at WebEx where she was a stellar UI Design Lead who managed the prototyping, testing and cross-project UI redesign of some of WebEx's leading projects. Elaine has superlative people skills; the ability to manage multiple concurrent deliverables, and a proven track record of developing an dimplementing innovative and successful user interfaces. It was a joy to work with Elaine and I'd always be interested in working with her or having her as part of my team.” 

Lyn Campbell, Senior Manager, Product Design Management, managed Elaine at Cisco webEx

Design Colleagues...

 

“Elaine is the best design mentor I've ever worked with.

She helped me tremendously to develop a design process, navigate a large organization, handle difficult situations, structure user research, manage stakeholders, and build great products. She has a tremendous amount of experience in Design, User Research, and Management.

If you're lucky enough to have Elaine interested to work with your team, hire her and don't look back. Your products will be better, your teams will be happier, and you will look like a genius.” July 1, 2010

Braden Kowitz, Senior User Experience Designer, Google
worked directly with Elaine at Google, USA

 

“I've worked with Elaine on a few projects, most noticeably on the strategy for Picasa Web Albums. Elaine has the unique quality of being a great people manager and UX designer at the same time. As designer she
always seem to come up effortlessly with innovative concepts, using lots of inspiring and creative methods in the process. As manager she's a great listener, coach and has excellent leadership skills. I really enjoy working with her!” April 9, 2010

Karen Groenink, User Experience Designer, Google worked directly with Elaine at Google, UK

 

“Elaine is one of the most dynamic UX professional I know. She is able to traverse many roles and do them well. As a manager, she is well loved by her team and they thrive through her guidance and mentorship. She is also instrumental in helping the larger cross-functional team formulate their product vision from a user-centered approach. As a thought leader and brainstorming partner, she is quick with the marker, making sketches and helping the team rapidly visualize and iterate through numerous possibilities. During implementation, Elaine can easily switch roles, roll up her sleeves and start producing mocks, conduct user research, get internal buy-in. She has the skills to do whatever necessary to move the designs forward. Elaine's contribution to any team will be immediate and prolific and I look forward to working with her again.” July 7, 2010

Jonathan Yu, Design Manager, Google worked directly with Elaine at Google, USA

 

“Elaine was a fantastic at wading into teams, understanding their broad needs, and then workshop a series of solutions that everyone could be enthusiastic about. She clearly had strong UX design insight and most importantly, knows how to get disorganized teams to rally around common goals.” July 22, 2010

Scott Jenson, UX design lead, Google worked directly with Elaine at Google, USA

 

“Elaine is one of the most talented designers I know. We worked closely together on a number of different projects at Cooper, and she consistently did superb work. She has a fantastic ability to understand a problem space, conceive novel solutions, and execute on designing the details. I would be lucky to have the chance to work with her again, as would anyone who hires her.” 

Adam Korman, Senior Designer, worked directly with Elaine at Cooper Interaction Design

 

“I worked with Elaine extensively on two major projects at Cooper and suffice it to say she is a rockstar. She is excellent at articulating her thoughts and designs, she has an eye for detail and style, and she is simply a joy to work with. I wish we were still working together!” 

Ryan Olshavsky, Principal Designer, worked directly with Elaine, Cooper Interaction Design

 

“I worked with Elaine on several projects at WebEx. I found her to be extremely professional and personable. Her workload was tremendous - and yet - she was calm under pressure and gave clear, concise creative direction. Her attention to detail for every aspect of the user experience was apparent in all of her work. I watched her interact with senior management and her staff with equal poise. I would not hesitate to work for or with her again.” 

Sara Papas Hillman, UI Designer, was a contractor to Elaine at Cisco WebEx

 

“I worked with Elaine on several engagements while she was at Cooper, including the design of a museum information and way-finding device and a surround sound control panel for the PC entertainment experience. Elaine has uncommon breadth and depth of skill and experience. She is a particularly extraordinary interaction designer with strong visual design skills to boot.” 

Nate Fortin, Director, Visual Design & Branding, worked with Elaine at Cooper Interaction Design

 

“Elaine is one of the rare breed of designers who can walk that fine line between being highly creative and generative, and being a clear communicator who can effectively explain the reasoning behind her ideas. To complete the package, she's a great collaborator and generally a total joy to work with.”

Dave Cronin, Principal Interaction Designer, worked directly with Elaine at Cooper Interaction Design

 

“Elaine introduced me to a Scottish phrase that I often use: "All fur coat and no knickers." You could apply that phrase to a lot of the software/UI world back when we worked together, the bad old days around the dot-com meltdown of 2001-3. If there was any good part of that crazy time, it was working with creative, fun, interesting people like Elaine. She and I had some great moments as a design team, tackling interesting UI problems, and doing the background work that turned into one of Cooper's journals, Reconciling Market Segments and Personas written of course by -- yes, Elaine. She can do it all, she always has fun, and on top of all that, she's a great designer.” 

Doug LeMoine, Director of Design Communication, worked directly with Elaine at Cooper Interaction Design