Kent Sullivan Email & Phone Number

My passion is doing whatever sort of data collection and analysis are necessary to generate breakthrough insights about customer behavior, needs, wants, desires, attitudes, and beliefs.My background is design research (aka UX research or user research). I have 25 years of experience doing this work and have come to believe strongly that integrating insights extracted from diverse data sources (design research, market research, telemetry, social networking, etc.) greatly increases the chances of those insights being breakthrough in nature.Arguments about the superiority of qualitative vs. quantitative, objective vs. subjective, formative vs. summative, or generative vs. evaluative miss the point -- all of these types of data and forms of research are required to create the rich picture needed to understand complex human-technology situations. Much iteration is also needed, using different research approaches and different stimuli, because any sufficiently-complicated design challenge starts with us not fully understand the problem / opportunity, let alone the solution.I believe that a cross-disciplinary approach to creating products yields the best results, but that finding productive ways for engineers, designers, and design researchers to work together is a complicated challenge. I am a key contributor to what I think will be a breakthrough book on this topic, Scenario-Focused Engineering (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735679339/).I also have strong beliefs around and professional experience with the power of deep collaboration among team members, and how hard it is to achieve this in a high-pressure corporate environment. I have applied skills and knowledge to these types of situations to help teams become more self-aware and the diversity of problem-solving / work styles among their members, build trust, and increase their collaboration meaningfully.

Listed skills include User Experience, User Research, Usability Testing, User Centered Design, and 46 others.