Barb Mackraz Email & Phone Number

Palo Alto, CA, US

Palo Alto CA, Fes Morocco, And Sekenani Kenya

We collaborate at the community level in rural Kenya and Morocco to develop resources and programs in literacy and education, sustainable livelihoods for women, clean water, and environmental stewardship. We're co-registered in Kenya as the community-based nonprofit Oliveseed Kenya Trust.https://www.oliveseed.org/

Palo Alto CA & Fes Morocco

I developed English libraries in Amazigh communities of rural Morocco in collaboration with local high school teachers and sometimes the Peace Corps and US Embassy. Morocco Library Project (MLP) has evolved to a nationwide Short Story Competition for Moroccan high school students, and I now manage it as part of Oliveseed Foundation. My mission at MLP is to.

Palo Alto

Consulted for companies in Silicon Valley on UX design, product planning, and usability. Among my long-term clients were Nuance, Microsoft, HP, MetroPCS, and mobile startups including Lexy and Touchtunes.

Silicon Valley

TechWomen is an initiative of the US State Department bringing emerging women leaders in STEM fields from the Middle East and Africa together with their counterparts in Silicon Valley. I was a member of the TechWomen team in 2014 and mentor to one of our guest engineers from Rwanda.

Mountain View

Early ideation for a proactive personal assistant (iOS). I worked closely with the cofounders on concept, and then supported the team for a year on feature brainstorming, UX design, team process, and usability.

Researched mobile devices internationally, and created a device taxonomy to guide product planning for a customer care mobile app, and ran usability studies on it. Designed a mobile product that adapted to different devices in the global market, from low end to smartphone, with configurable feature sets.

San Francisco

I established UX processes and best practices when chatbot company VirtuOz moved its headquarters from Paris to San Francisco. Working with the business team, I also developed early-phase product concepts and strategy for enterprise clients, from idea through mockup. Ran a year-long series of user studies on chatbot interfaces, conversation flow.

After Tellme, I continued consulting for AA on their Remember Me features using speech recognition.

Mountain View

Tellme was an early innovator in speech recognition and conversational interfaces. I was a founding member of the design team, and for 5 years designed many of our flagship applications including airline apps, voice dialer, Olympics event finder... Wrote the Tellme VUI design standards.

Cupertino

Defined and wrote guidelines for many UX standards that are in use today. I co-wrote the first Apple Human Interface Checklist. Principal writer for the Apple Publications Style Guide, still in use.

Princeton, New Jersey

Edited books in the humanities.

Master Of Liberal Arts (Mla)

My thesis was on Africa and the mythical Nile in early modern cartography. I curated an exhibit on this for the opening of the David.

Summer Graduate Institute: Globalization And Development In Africa

Graduate workshop on sub-Saharan Africa, from colonialism to contemporary challenges in health, human rights, and poverty alleviation. My.

Ba, European History

Cum laude, High Distinction history honors