A little about me:Avery Roeser

My path to UX wasn’t exactly a straight line. I started in journalism and communications, then found my way into visual design and technology almost by accident. Along the way I kept circling back to the same question: how do we make things easier for people to understand and use? Eventually I stopped treating that as a side interest and started treating it as the job.

At Barclays, I managed a high-volume design queue and designed an internal design training program from needs analysis through evaluation, which taught me a lot about designing at scale without losing sight of the actual humans on the other end. These days, I’m most interested in figuring out what people actually need before I let myself decide what to design, whether that’s a product they use or something they’re learning. It’s a lot harder to fall in love with the wrong idea if you talk to people first.

I like design when there’s a reason behind it. Give me a hunch and I’ll want to test it. Give me an assumption and I’ll want to poke holes in it. I’d rather let research settle the argument than win one on vibes alone.

Outside of that, I’m working through my M.Ed. in Instructional Design (it turns out how people learn and how people use things are close cousins), volunteering to teach ASL, losing hours to The Big Walk, PEAK, and Minecraft, chipping away at puzzles I probably don’t need to finish, and listening to far more Audrey Hobert than is probably healthy.