Biography

Louise Ferguson is a UK-based technologist, user experience consultant and writer. Her areas of interest and experience include:

• User research
• Ethnographic (field) research
• User-centred design
• Usability testing
• Intranets and enterprise portals
  
• Public sector: e-government, e-democracy and e-voting
• Technology in organisations
• Cross-cultural issues, internationalisation and localisation

Experience

Recent and current clients include:

• Paddington Development Trust
• Ideas Bazaar/PricewaterhouseCoopers (UK)
• Namahn (Belgium)
• Department of Trade and Industry
• Sapient/BP
• The Work Foundation
• Department of Work and Pensions
• iSociety
• Hewlett-Packard
• BT
  
• The Usability Company
  
• University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)

Louise also runs user research training in association with User Focus, provides Intranet usability evaluation for FTSE100 clients of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, and works with a range of design agencies.

Forthcoming speaking engagements

• Re-Design Your Intranet 2005: conference session and full-day workshop
• People Inspired Innovation Conference 2005
  
• British Psychological Society annual conference 2005
• Manchester Usability Group

Recent speaking engagements

• South-West Usability Group (Bristol)
• Usability Professionals' Association annual conference 2004 (Minneapolis)
• Dust or Magic 2004 (Oxford University)
• New Media Knowledge (London)
• Oxford Internet Institute (Oxford University)
• BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour
• University of Glasgow
• UK Usability Professionals' Association (London)
• International TEHRE European Conference
• AIGA Experience Design (London)
• Institute of Linguists
• University of Barcelona
• ESADE business school (Barcelona)

Other activities

• Vice President, UK Usability Professionals' Assocation

• Design Council: Touching the State project: expert contributor

• Churchill Fellow: investigating the voter experience and the usability and accessibility of voting technologies, old and new

Articles on the use of technology

The Guardian business and Guardian Online supplement, Public Finance magazine, The Industry Standard, El Mundo, eGov Monitor, UPA Voice, Usability News, The Linguist, the Design Council and Open Democracy.

Qualifications

• MSc Human-Centred Computer Systems, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex
• BSc (Econ), University College London
• Qualified translator, Spanish/Catalan - English

Affiliations

• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• ACM Special Interest Group, Computer-Human Interaction (SIG-CHI)
• British HCI Group (Special Interest Group of the British Computer Society)
• Usability Professionals' Association
  - Vice President UK Chapter
  - Co-leader of the UPA's international Voting and Usability Project
• Institute of Linguists - full professional member (MIL)