Nancy Frishberg brings the perspective of user-centered design to each project. She believes in, practices and promotes interaction with the people who use the products we make throughout the whole design process, from early concept and prototype development to beta testing and post-release phases. The aim always is to create products and services will be usable, useful and enjoyable by the intended audiences.

Her prior work with organizations to design products puts people at the center of user experiences. She employs appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods to aid decision-making in product design. Her professional career spans industry, academia, and non-profit organizations. At Sun Microsystems, her team conducted the first laboratory usability study (2001) of a large scale Open Source Software project, the GNOME desktop. At New Media Centers, Apple Computer and IBM she advanced academic computing, contributed to handheld usability, organized the engineering side of business relationships, created award-winning multimedia tools, promoted disability access, and managed technical professionals.

A teacher and trainer, she holds a Ph.D. from University of California at San Diego in linguistics. Her book on sign language interpreting, in print continuously for over 20 years, serves as the basis for the national written examinations supervised by the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf. In her role as a volunteer panelist for the Ask-A-Linguist online service of the Linguist List, she answers questions from the general public about sign languages, writing systems, product naming, careers outside the academy, among other topics. She's been active in ACM's SIGCHI conferences as a participant, author or program organizer since 1989, and was a co-chair for the Designing for User eXperience conference held in San Francisco in Fall 2005. Most recently she has added certification as an Innovation Games® facilitator to her repertoire, helping organizations create breakthrough products through collaborative play.

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