Donna Spencer

Donna’s a user experience designer, specialising in information architecture and interaction design. That’s a fancy way of saying she plans how to present the things you see on your computer screen, so that they’re easy to understand, engaging and compelling.

Most of the projects Donna works on are large, messy monsters, like government websites and intranets, internal business applications and web applications. Occasionally she gets to work on something new and cool. So she’s familiar with the challenges of long-term, ongoing projects and short-burst, agile projects. She’s also an old hand at sketching screens, drawing wireframes and building prototypes.

But whatever sort of job Donna’s working on, there’s one common requirement. She has to comprehensively understand the needs of the people who will use it. Only then can she make the system as usable as possible. Luckily, she also quite likes talking with people, and finds doing user research great fun.

Not surprisingly, given Donna’s obsession with usability and fondness of people, she’s also quite the teacher. She’s a very experienced speaker and regularly runs workshops and speaks at local and international conferences, on the topics of information architecture, interaction design, the web, writing and more. She even runs a user experience conference (UX Australia).

Donna’s been doing this since 2002. She’s worked on the board of the Information Architecture Institute (international), has judged many web awards and even mentored for a start-up program in Brazil. She’s written three books – on card sorting, web writing and information architecture.

Presenting at UX New Zealand 2013:
Introduction to user experience design