About David Travis
David Travis offers usability consultancy through Userfocus and usability training through The Usability Training Centre.
“Dr Travis knows the web usability territory well, and lays out a clear map for newcomers to follow.”
— Ben Shneiderman, author of 'Designing the User Interface'.
Qualifications
David Travis is the Managing Director of Userfocus, an independent consultancy specialising in usability training and usability consultancy. David holds a BSc (Hons) degree and a PhD in Psychology. David's professional affiliations include membership of the British Psychological Society, the Experimental Psychology Society and the User Experience Professionals Association. He represents the BSI on two ISO working groups, where he is currently the UK expert contributing to usability and ergonomics standards such as ISO 9241 and ISO 13407. He is a Chartered Psychologist and has published over 30 scientific papers, including three books, and led seminars and tutorials at international symposia. His most recent book, E-commerce Usability, was published in 2003.
Experience
David has worked in the areas of psychology and user interface design for over 20 years. Between 1983 and 1988, he carried out research in psychology at the universities of Cambridge, London, York and New York. Since 1988 he has worked as a usability consultant, first as an internal consultant at BT Laboratories and later (since 1995) as an external consultant. David specialises in the design and evaluation of hardware and software systems aimed at non-technical users and he has logged over four hundred hours in usability labs. His assignments have covered every aspect of user interface design, including:
- Interviewing and observing customers to understand their behaviour with new technology.
- Building real, complete, representative tasks.
- Designing paper and electronic prototypes.
- Carrying out user interface inspections.
- Setting usability benchmarks.
- Usability testing products with customers.
- Evaluating an organisation's processes and practices in usability.
Client Highlights
David's assignments have ranged across products, platforms, applications and industries. His experience covers desktop, web, mobile devices, IVR, retail, consumer products, internet and intranet solutions for clients in the public and private sector. Some recent examples include:
- Usability testing several interactive voice response applications for Orange.
- Evaluation of print management software and web self-service software for HP.
- Expert evaluation of various handheld card authentication devices for Barclays.
- Benchmarking the usability of consumer products for Whirlpool, allowing direct comparison with competitor products.
- Contextual inquiry, card sorting and iterative usability testing of paper and electronic prototypes for the Royal Bank of Scotland's intranet.
- Usability evaluation of Xbox games controllers with teenage gamers for Microsoft.
- Usability evaluation of web education portals for Becta with teachers and educationalists.
- Auditing the accessibility of web sites against WCAG 1.0 guidelines for Wolterskluwer.
- Usability testing a multi-lingual e-commerce web site for Kodak (in French, German and English), that provides customer service information as well as product sales.
- Usability expert evaluations of web sites for various clients, including Nottinghamshire County Council, Getmapping, Skype, The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, Greater London Authority and Thomas Cook.
- Running public and in-house usability training courses for dozens of clients, including American Express, Standard Life, Whirlpool, O2, Vodafone, Crown Packaging, BUPA, Ordnance Survey, LexisNexis, Red-Gate Software and Opodo.