The Group

Nicole is an industry-recognized professional with 20+ years experience as a user-centered research and usability professional.

She is a strong user advocate, who enjoys improving the customer experience, increasing user satisfaction and retention through user feedback and excellent design. She is also a strategic thinker who starts up and leverages user-centered design and usability teams to increase product revenues and market share by increasing customer satisfaction.

Nicole moved to Vancouver to take up the position of Senior Director, CCD and build the interaction design and usability team for Sage Canada. Before Sage, she ran her own company, Userstudies, in New Mexico, consulting with teams that created customer-facing systems: web, IVR, speech recognition, mobile.

Prior to that, Nicole was Director, Usability Engineering at Nuance, a leading speech recognition company, where she created a usability engineering team within Professional Services and developed, with their help, a research process and usability methods for natural language speech systems.

She was also a Member of the Research Staff at Interval Research, Paul Allen's think tank, where she performed consumer usability studies, field studies and contextual analyses with consumers in their homes, as part of a user-aided design process which resulted in the development and funding of a series of cutting-edge prototypes.

Nicole has also worked in management positions at Citibank and Bell Canada, developing new telecommunications services and completed consulting work for clients such as Visa, Apple Computer, AAA, IDEO, Nortel, Citibank and a series of dot.com companies.

Jessica is a highly experienced information architect who specializes in taxonomy and metadata development and the design of knowledge sharing applications.

Jessica has worked on large-scale intranet and content management projects for PHSA, BCCDC, TransLink, Electronic Arts, Creo (now Kodak Canada), VanCity, and the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. She also has extensive experience gathering user requirements, conducting usability testing, and interviewing users.

From 2001 through 2008, Jessica was an active member of the Vancouver-based Knowledge Management Community of Practice and was on the Board for 2007 and 2008.

Jessica has a graduate degree in Library and Information Science from the University of British Columbia as well as a degree in Anthropology.

She has been with Analytic Design Group since 2007, and has lead a number of our large design projects, including PHSA Intranet, BC Cancer Agency website, BC Centre for Disease Control website, TransLink website, TransLink trip planner tools, and BC Early Hearing Program Extranet.

Chirag has a graduate degree from Simon Fraser University in Computer Science with an area of focus in usability testing.

Chirag is familiar and comfortable with many aspects of usability: he has led focus-group discussions with target end users, developed low- and high-fidelity prototypes, and conducted one-on-one usability tests with users.

He also has a background in Quality Assurance from working with the Microsoft Interface team in Denmark, where he discovered a passion for hunting for user experience pitfalls. He used this experience to hone his skills in identifying obstacles to userʼs task completion and to providing solutions to these issues.

Chirag has been at Analytic Design Group Inc. for over a year. During this time, he has been a core member of the Usability team, facilitating face-to-face usability tests as well as remote usability tests. He has also been responsible for producing the usability testing reports for many of our clients.