Irene Au graduated from the University of South Carolina with a bachelor of science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She went on to pursue her master’s degree at the University of Illinois, where she majored in Industrial Engineering/Human-Computer Interaction.
After completing her master’s studies, she began her career as an interaction designer at Netscape Communication. At Netscape Communications, she played an innovative role in designing Netscape’s suite of client products such as the browser and mail/news pages – which became the Internet’s first commercial web browser. After that, she continued practicing her design skills, and she joined Yahoo, where she built their user-centered design. Consequently, she led the company’s User Experience and Design team for eight years. She then joined Google and led their entire UX team for six years. She continued to sharpen her experience in user design at Udacity where she spent two years after her time at Google.
After gaining experience in working for big companies, she joined Khosla Ventures as an operating partner. At Khosla Ventures, she assists startups from all stages to make their design great. In sum, Irene Au has an unprecedented experience in elevating the strategic importance of design, and she speaks passionately about this subject and creativity in her speeches and writings as seen in her latest book Design in Venture Capital.
Irene is important to the interaction design field not only because of her design practices, leadership skills, and her achievements in the design field but also because of her mentor assistance and education to a lot of designers. she has given dozens of speeches and talks around the nation and she teaches her students from the great and high value experience she had with other designers. Lots of interaction design students have been inspired by her talks and classes.
Besides being a world-class user designer expert, she also teachers yoga and meditation at Avalon Art and Yoga Center in Palo Alto. Furthermore, she is an author and speaker on mindfulness practices.
References
Au, Irene, et al. “User experience at google: focus on the user and all else will follow.” CHI’08 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2008. 3681-3686.
Au, Irene, and Shuang Li. “Netscape communicator’s collapsible toolbars.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1998.
“Irene Au Personal Site” Accessed 25 Oct. 2020 https://ireneau.com/
“The Future of Human-Computer Interaction with Irene Au.” YouTube, 8 May 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZyt2ADdUzA
“Irene Au.” Khosla Ventures, 22 June 2015, www.khoslaventures.com/team/irene-au#:%7E:text=After%20Netscape%2C%20Irene%20joined%20Yahoo,all%20Google%2Dbranded%20products%20worldwide.
