Irene Au is a female user experience designer based in Palo Alto, California. She graduated from bachelor’s of science degree USC electrical and computer engineering and master’s of science degree from UIUC’s science in industrial engineering and human-computer interaction. Irene is also a person who has a lot of jobs, she is an executive, a yoga teacher, and a designer. She is a designer who focuses on user experience, she used to be the head of the design teams for Google and Yahoo. And now, she is an operating partner at Khosla Ventures to work for helping other companies’ UX get better. The main goal she works for today is to find what users need and create a good design for them to solve their problems.
Irene talks about user experience, design, and technology in a lot of speech. In one of her talks at TEDxYouth@TheNuevaSchool, she introduced what is Human-Computer Interaction and how it works step by step till today, also how it will work in the future. After listening to her speech, it kind of helped me understand this HCI part of Interaction design. HCI starts when computers first release, HCI designers try to turn code into a visual interface that users can easily hand on. After smartphone and internet release, they start to combine these two with big data to create experiences that users might need and expect. Now, designers start adding sensors on the machine to turn the digital world into real life, which is AR, VR we see today. Finally, what they expect in the future is to make computers think and act more like humans, so they can help us solve a lot of problems.
However, she also pointed out that machines or technology should be a helper of humans, so interaction designers or UX designers should remember this. Otherwise, things might get out of control, maybe there is no need for humans to survive in the future.
Bibliography:
“Irene Au.” Women Talk Design, womentalkdesign.com/speakers/irene-au/.
Au, Irene. “Irene Au on About.me.” About.me, about.me/ireneau.
Tedx Talk. “The Future of Human-Computer Interaction | Irene Au | TEDxYouth@TheNuevaSchool” Online video clip. YouTube. Name of Website’s publisher, 10 Jul. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_ZzhadA3DY.
“Irene Au.” The Interaction Design Foundation, www.interaction-design.org/irene_au.
Au, Irene. Irene Au, 21 Aug. 2015, ireneau.com/.
Irene was my boss – hired me at Yahoo! – and has been a long-time friend of CCA. I’m hoping to get her here to speak again soon.
I’d love to know about the work she has done that contributes to the UX world!