Biography

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

• Public sector: e-government, e-democracy and voting
• Financial services
• Third sector and effective campaigning
• Music
• Intranets and enterprise portals
• Technology in organisations

Experience

Louise was the Head of Usability Evaluation for the Intranet Benchmarking Forum from 2005 to 2009. In that time she conducted more than 150 usability evaluations for private sector clients ranging from Alliance & Leicester to Unilever, and for public sector clients from the Bank of England to Scottish Enterprise.

Among other projects, Louise has recently been working with the Electoral Commission, advising on user experience of voting materials in statutory elections run by hundreds of local administrations across the UK. Elections present particular challenges: the population of citizens eligible to vote represents more than 99% of adults, a much wider user group than for e-commerce or banking. A significant proportion will have limited reading skills or one of a range of disabilities. In the regions, materials may need to be multilingual. And materials change from election to election, each time having to be prepared at short notice.

Louise has taught third year undergraduates on the Coventry School of Art and Design computing and design courses and in 2009 has been teaching user research to undergraduate design students at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. She also conducts in-house user research training in association with User Focus.

Her clients have included many household names in both public and private sectors in the UK and Europe.

Complete list of clients.

Past speaking engagements

• Royal College of Art postgraduate programme
• In The City
• Scottish UPA
• Re-Design Your Intranet: conference session and full-day workshop
• People Inspired Innovation Conference
• British Psychological Society annual conference: symposium
• Manchester Usability Group
• South-West Usability Group (Bristol)
• AIGA at the Design Council
• 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

• Open Rights Group: founding Chair (2005-8); Vice Chair (2008-9); Advisory Council (2009-)
• Member of the Advisory Council of the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR)
• Past Board member and Vice President, UK Usability Professionals’ Association (2001-4)
• Management Committee, Dulwich Going Greener
• Technical Committee, Crystal Palace Triangle Planning Group

Articles and publications on the use of technology

The Guardian business and Guardian Online supplement, The Work Foundation (Getting By, Not Getting On: Technology in UK Workplaces research report), Public Finance magazine, The Industry Standard, El Mundo, eGov Monitor, UPA Voice, Usability News, The Linguist, the Design Council (Touching the State) 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
  - Past Vice President UK Chapter
  - Co-leader of the UPA’s international Voting and Usability Project
• Institute of Linguists – full professional member (MCIL)