Email: jna.brown@gmail.com
Website: JNABrown
CURRENTLY
Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland, August 2023 - Present
Lecturer in HCI & Games, School of Computing
UX RESEARCH HISTORY
Freelance Consulting, worldwide, October 2021 – Present
Still solving problems for major companies, but doing it guerrilla-style, without the need to improve their research culture or the opportunity to mentor their staff.
Short project work in UX Research, Human Factors & Ergonomics, Design, and Education.
Highlights include applied ethnographic research to help Google/YouTube understand and respond to issues with their content-flagging process, and an ergonomic evaluation of new gate prototypes for Amazon's touchless stores to point them towards compliance with new European regulations.
In my spare time, I provided the cover art for the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek, wrote and delivered my annual Masters seminar on the neuropsychology of video games, and continue to write and illustrate my next two books. I’ve also been appearing regularly on Delta CX’s live Ask Me Anything sessions with host Debbie Levitt, in order to help aspiring UX researchers.
Evolv Technologies, San Francisco, July 2019 – August 2021
Evolv wanted to automate the commercial UX optimization process.
I organized 1,000 industry-wide UX heuristics into my periodic table that ranks and maps them to a practical UI taxonomy so that formal hypotheses can be generated, tested, and evaluated by humans and an optimization AI. During this process, I mentored a young design researcher and the established UX Design Lead and provided training and support to staff and overseas partners.
LinkedIn’s UX Design Group, Sunnyvale, August 2018 – March 2019
LinkedIn wanted to find out why so many were complaining about their Help and Support pages, even though the pages were getting a lot of use.
I reviewed in-house data, conducted ethnographic interviews and cognitive walkthroughs, constructed personas, use cases and journey maps, and reported the surprising results formally and informally. The resultant designs were implemented across their products. I also mentored a young design researcher throughout the process.
Facebook's Social Good & Goodwill Team, Menlo Park, March 2018 – May 2018
Facebook couldn’t explain the inconsistencies in their primary user metric.
I uncovered the problems by examining their methodology, then re-evaluated the previously-extracted quantitative and qualitative data from international studies of intensive supporters, examined the data with statistically-sound methods, and used it as the basis for generating personas and use cases based on the experiences that those supporters identified as transformative.
Google’s Cross-Advertiser UXR Team, San Bruno, December 2016 – June 2017
Google was having trouble getting useful qualitative data out of the multi-year study of a new YouTube product and was seeing unanticipated variance in their statistical evaluation of others.
I helped to establish a better understanding of the difference between qualitative and quantitative data extraction and statistics. I performed heuristic analyses of several new products for Google and YouTube and conducted live research interviews as part of a cross-disciplinary design sprint.
UX Expert Services Team, OutSystems, Lisbon, 2015-2016
OutSystems had just become the fastest growing SAAS company in Europe and needed to be able to deliver more UX expertise than they had in-house.
I came on board as an internal and external advocate of UX Design and the scientific method, collaborating with teams of researchers, engineers, programmers, and designers for in-house and client-facing projects, across Europe and around the world. This included performing active design research in collaboration with a UX designer on a different continent and time zone.
FURTHER EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
Lecturer
Game Studies and Engineering program, Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, 2021-22
Human Factors Specialist
Aviation Safety Intelligence, Govt of Canada, Ottawa, 2008-09
Project Lead
Canadian Armed Forces Combat Training Center, Base Gagetown, 2005-06
Visiting Researcher
National Research Council of Canada, Fredericton, 2004
EDUCATION
2014 - Earned doctorates from three universities through the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Program in Interactive & Cognitive Environments, sponsored by the EACEA Agency of the European Commission and Lakeside Labs in Austria.
PhD, from Alpen-Adria Universität-Klagenfurt in Austria
PhD from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain
Dott Ric from Università degli Studi di Genova in Italy
Additional Degrees
2004 - MSc in Ergonomics & Applied Biomechanics, University of New Brunswick in Canada
1997 - Diploma in Computer Animation, Academy of Design in Canada
1993 - Certificate in Sequential Art, Kubert School, in the USA
1991 - BEd in Education, Brock University in Canada
1989 - BA in Linguistics, McMaster University in Canada
1986 - BA in Anthropology, McMaster University in Canada
BOOKS
Set Phasers to Teach! Star Trek in Research and Teaching (2018) Rabitsch, S., Gabriel, M., Elmenreich, W., Brown, J.N.A., Eds. Springer, Cham.
Building an Intuitive Multimodal Interface for a Smart Home: Hunting the SNARK (2017) Brown, J.N.A., Fercher, A. and Leitner, G. SpringerBriefs in HCI, Springer International Publishing, Switzerland.
Anthropology-Based Computing: Putting the Human in Human-Computer Interaction (2016) Brown, J.N.A. Springer Human Computer Interaction Series. Springer International Publishing, Switzerland.
SMALL SAMPLE OF OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Brown, J.N.A. and Esterle, L. (2020). I’m Already Optimal: The Dunning-Kruger Effect, Sociogenesis, and Self-Integration. Intl. Workshop on Self-Improving Systems Integration.
Esterle, L., & Brown, J.N.A. (2020). I Think Therefore You Are: Models for Interaction in Collectives of Self-Aware Cyber-Physical Systems. ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, 4(4), [39] 1-25.
Brown, J.N.A., Oliveira, J., and Bakker, S. (2015). I Am Calm: Towards a Psychoneurological Evaluation of ABC Ringtones. Interaction Design and Architecture(s) 26, pp. 55-69.
Brown, J.N.A. (2015). “Once More, with Feeling”: Using Haptics to Preserve Tactile Memories. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 31(1), 65-71. Brown, J.N.A. (2015). Ethnographic Methods. The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design. C. Edwards, (Editor), London: Bloomsbury Academic.
SMALL SAMPLE OF CERTIFICATES & SPECIAL AWARDS
Establishing Effective Virtual Teams - ThinkHR
Lecturer Accreditation - Agència per a la Qualitat del Sistema Universitari de Catalunya
System Safety/Safety Intelligence Specialist Certifications - Transport Canada, Civil Aviation
Facilitation: Processes, Techniques & Logistics Certification - RANA Development, Inc.
Human Factors Analysis & Classification System Certification - Wiegmann, Shappell
HQP Fellowships - The Canadian Network of Centres of Excellence on the Future of the Automobile, and the Canadian Network of Centres of Excellence on the Mathematics of Information Technology & Complex Systems
Certificate of Recognition from the International Red Cross for services rendered during Operation: Grounded after the attacks on the USA on September 11th, 2001