Speaker Biographies
Vidya Drego
Senior Analyst
Forrester Research
Research Focus
Vidya serves Customer Experience professionals. Her research focuses on the customer research, design, and usability process behind creating great customer experiences to improve profitability both in and across customer-facing channels. By helping companies find and partner with the right interactive agency or improve their internal design and usability processes with tools like personas and techniques like heuristic evaluations, she helps firms show measurable improvements in the experience in and across digital channels.
Her research coverage includes interactive agencies, customer experience strategy, Web and mobile Web site design and usability, out-of-box experience, and persona development and use. In addition, she teaches Workshops on and performs reviews of Web sites, cross channels, personas, and brand experiences.
Previous Work Experience
Vidya comes to Forrester with design and strategy experience from the technology industry. Most recently, she was a user-interface designer with the award-winning customer innovation and design team at Symbol Technologies. In that role, she led the design of the mobility platform that allows Symbol customers to manage their fleet of mobile devices. Prior to Symbol, Vidya was in the office of the CTO at Critical Path, where she helped shape new product strategy for the mobile application provider.
Vidya's work has ranged from user research to interaction and user interface design. She has published work in the 2004 BT Technology Journal as well as the ACM conference for User Interface Software Technology (UIST).
Education
Vidya holds a master's degree in media arts and sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, where she received an Intel Fellowship to research and design mobile applications for an internal technology team. She also holds a bachelor's degree in symbolic systems with a concentration in human-computer interaction from Stanford University.
Sessions Featuring This Speaker
December 3, 2008
Persona Creation