Our Team

J. Shawn Farris, Ph.D.

Managing Director

Shawn holds a Ph.D. in Human Factors and Cognitive Psychology. He is one of the co-founders of the Human-Web Interaction Cycle (HuWI), which is a framework of theories that explain how people perceive, use, and learn about the websites that they use. Shawn has published multiple papers on web navigation, methods for optimizing user performance on computer user interfaces, web accessibility, and distance education. He also has expertise in cognitive task analysis and his analyses have significantly impacted the design of products that are used by some of the worlds largest telecommunications companies.

Brian Zimmerman, M.S.

Managing Director

Brian holds a M.S. in Information Science. He has served as the usability manager of a major software company. Brian has expertise in interface design, task analysis, and usability testing. Brian is also a co-designer of a patent for a user interface that is used by several major United States and international companies for finding and manipulating large amounts of complex data.

Pete Elgin, Ph.D.

Sr. Human Factors Consultant

Pete has a Ph.D. in Human Factors and Cognitive Psychology. He was co-leader of a team that won a NASA sponsored national design competition. Pete has expertise in cognitive, perceptual, and usability issues regarding visual displays. He has published research in decision-making, distance education, and web navigation. Pete is also a co-developer of a new usability tool that attenuates subjective evaluations of user interfaces by adopting a more behaviorally based approach in order to efficiently yet comprehensively assesses user interfaces. Several multi-function displays from some of the largest avionics manufacturers have been evaluated using this tool.

Brian Friel, Ph.D.

Sr. Human Factors Consultant

Brian holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Delaware State University, and has also worked on assessment of expertise, decision making, and skill development. Brian has published multiple papers and given many conference presentations on reading processes, word recognition, bilingualism, skill development, and expertise. He has a strong background in psycholinguistics, which plays an important role in designing user interfaces that support rapid user comprehension and learning.

Lauren Murphy, Ph.D.

Sr. Human Factors Consultant

Lauren holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology with a focus in Human Factors and Cognition. Her main areas of expertise are designing for positive emotion, aesthetic design principles, and performance measurement. Lauren is a pioneer in a branch of science and design devoted to the promotion of pleasurable human-machine interaction (i.e., hedonomics). With her focus on making the user experience as pleasurable as possible, Lauren's work has promoted an emergent movement that seeks to promote pleasure through design by incorporating user-experience goals, principles, and guidelines throughout the entire development lifecycle.

Kim Raddatz, Ph.D.

Sr. Human Factors Consultant

Kim holds a Ph.D. in Human Factors and Cognitive Psychology. She has expertise in perceptual and cognitive issues of display design and display integration and her research efforts have garnered both FAA and NASA grant support. She is also co-developer of a usability assessment tool designed to support a behaviorally-based evaluation of an interface at nearly any stage in the design lifecycle. To date, this tool has been applied to the assessment of multi-function displays from several of the nation's largest avionics manufacturers. Kim also has expertise in the design and evaluation of computer-generated three-dimensional environments and in the development of decision-aids.

Tuan Tran, Ph.D.

Sr. Human Factors Consultant

Tuan holds a Ph.D. in Human Factors and Cognitive Psychology. He has extensive expertise in attention, memory, and comprehension and their application to the issues inherent in human-machine and human-web interaction, such as understanding how users access and remembers target information. Tuan has also cultivated an extensive research paradigm addressing the issue of emotion and its effects on users' ability to perceive, understand, and remember events/information. He has extended this paradigm to the examination of how web-based interfaces can be designed to elicit either a positive or negative emotional response and how that elicited emotional response may influence users' motivation to explore and their cognitive capacity to comprehend and remember.