HFES Mentorship Committee Webinar: Navigating the UX Research Job Market: Insights from Industry Experts

Dr. Akilah Hugine-Elmore is currently a Director of UX Research at FanDuel. Akilah has over 10 years of experience in the area of user experience research. Her goal as a user experience practitioner is to drive profitable product development through the generation and application of user experience and customer experience research. She holds a Bachelors and Masters degrees in Electrical Engineering, as well as a PhD in Systems & Information Engineering with a concentration in Human Factors. Akilah is a member of a number of UX focused organizations, including Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) and Technology Association of Georgia (TAG). She has numerous passions including diversity & inclusion  initiatives, increasing women in STEM, and increasing the representation of HBCU graduates in the tech field. However, her greatest joy is being a mother to her three kids, Amir, Nylah, and Kal-el.

Laura Vennie is an accomplished User Experience Research Director with over 24 years of experience in the field. Currently, she’s the Director of User Experience at Newell Brands and has played a pivotal role in driving the company’s user-centered design approach. Laura has a rich background in User Experience Research and Design working effectively across complex organizations and working closely with interdisciplinary teams. She has worked on both physical and digital products in addition to in-store experiences to provide ergonomics, usability, and overall user experience to consumers. She is highly skilled in a range of research methods including usability testing, ethnography and sensorial research. She is adept at leading and managing cross-functional teams, ensuring that research findings are translated into actionable insights.

Kevin Corti is a Quantitative UX researcher and engineering manager at Google (2017- present) and was formerly a data scientist at Uber (2015-17). He holds a PhD in social psychology from the London School of Economics where his research explored how people perceive and interact with artificial conversational agents. His work as a UX researcher has spanned numerous product domains and methodologies, from understanding the micro-level moments of user interactions with software products to understanding macro-level phenomena that describe user populations. At present, his focus is on building the nascent discipline of “UX data engineering” at Google: helping teams design and productionize data and data-products that streamline impactful user research.

In her current position as a UX researcher at John Deere, Sruthy concentrates on conducting research throughout various product development phases to enhance the customer experience of John Deere’s products including machine displays, website and mobile app. She is currently serving as a member of the HFES mentorship committee.

Christy is the co-owner of the consulting group End to End User Research, which provides research services, facility rentals and participant recruiting. Christy began her human factors career at Compaq and HP where she moved from practitioner to Master Technologist and team manager, leading a group of researchers in the product design group. Christy’s areas of expertise are ethnographic research and research applied to product design. Christy’s research has led to product innovations, and she has contributed to three patents. She received her Master of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees in Psychology from the University of Houston-Clear Lake, where she is a Distinguished Alumni and Chairperson of the Advisory board for the Human Factors Psychology Program.

For HFES, she is currently serving as Executive at Large and Local Chapter Chairperson. She is a Past President for the HFES WOMAN affinity group, where she was the recipient of the 2021 Mentor of the Year award. She contributed to the HFES UX Task Force report and is a member of HFES Meetings committee and the Membership committee. Locally, she remains involved as a mentor and serves as an advisor and the social media Officer for the Houston chapter of HFES.