My Profile

• I have a passion for understanding people and how technology can help people. Recently, I have been interested in social software and technology-supported collaborative work.
• Many years of behavioral research have taught me how to design experiments and how to measure complex things like human behavior.
• Many years in a large corporation have taught me the importance of identifying and clarifying business goals and needs, measuring results, and providing value (real and perceived) to both users and business. I’ve led and grown multidisciplinary UX teams that focus on creating beautiful and delightful user experiences.
• Many years of usability experience made me quite good in detecting what works and what doesn’t in a user interface.
• The skill I am most proud of is the ability to understand what’s in people’s heads (after all, I am a psychologist by training) by observing what they do, how they do it, and how they talk about it; and how to translate what I learn in user research into products, interfaces, and experiences.
• I am a geeky kind of girl, I like messing with code, and love to explore how new technologies can contribute to a better user experience.
• I believe in working with others, because most of the times groups of people trying to solve a problem together find better solutions than lone geniuses. Social dynamics are tricky, though, so I try to avoid situations in which large groups of people try to design by consensus.

My Work History

UX Manager, Jan 2011 – present
Google, Inc. - New York, NY

• Led the User experience team (UX Designers, User Researchers, and Prototypers) for Google Docs and Drive.

Senior User Researcher, October 2006 – Dec 2010
Google, Inc. – New York, NY

• I worked on many products, focusing first on Search and then on Google Apps. When I was on search, I was the resident user researcher  on a “startup” project that produced Google Squared, and was the foundation of many recent search improvements on entities. During the last year I worked as research lead on Google Docs.

User Experience Manager, January 2006 – October 2006
The Vanguard Group – Malvern, PA

• I managed a multidisciplinary design team (information designers, information architects, and usability engineers) that designed concepts for web applications.
• We focused on on the early phases of the User-Centered design process (user research, visioning, and concepts), but we also provided recommendations for appropriate technological solutions for our designs.

User Experience Analyst, July 2005 – December 2005
The Vanguard Group – Malvern, PA

• For six months, I worked with our print design teams to apply a modified version of our User-Centered approach to designing forms and brochures.
• My mission was to show the importance of collecting information from internal and external users and to mentor the team through the steps of the User-Centered Design process.
• The first new print kit is now in pilot, and preliminary results are showing a 2-fold increase in conversion rate.

Web Usability Manager, April 2002 – June 2005
The Vanguard Group – Malvern, PA

• I managed Vanguard Web Usability team for 3 years. The team supported usability work for all our web-based application, both client-facing and internal-facing. Some of the projects we supported were very large, and in this period we contributed to the redesign of almost all our company’s internal and external applications
• The team was initially small and, as our workload increased, we had to be creative in improving our efficiency, finding better and faster techniques to evaluate design, and learning efficient and persuasive ways of communicating our results. We used best practice, six-sigma tools, experimentation, and sheer ingenuity.
• My team’s mission was to provide data and information to improve decision-making in application development. In addition to data from usability studies and interviews, we colleted data from web logs, data mining, marketing and third party research, and any source of user feedback we managed to get our hands on.
• Among the many techniques we used:
  • Contextual inquiries, users’ interviews and surveys to collect user information used to create user profiles and personas, user goals, and scenarios;
  • Persona- and scenario-based heuristic evaluations;
  • Rigorous and iterative user testing form the earliest design concept to later detailed design;
  • Predictive modeling and efficiency studies to improve efficiency of internal applications for phone and processing representatives.

Web Usability Engineer, August 2000 – March 2002
The Vanguard Group – Malvern, PA

• Here I learned the crafts of usability engineering and found ways to apply my behavioral research background to design. I immediately got myself in trouble for trying new tools and techniques when the old didn’t seem to provide the right answers or reliable results, for questioning assumptions and simplifications, and for asking “why?” too many times. At the end, striving for quality paid off, but I also learned how to balance diplomacy, persuasion, and assertiveness.
• I planned and conducted usability studies, heuristic evaluations, card sorting exercises, user interviews, observations; I created user profiles, personas and scenarios; I contributed to the development and iteration of design with the other members of the project team.

Post-doctoral Fellow, October 1998-July 2000
Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute, Philadelphia, PA

• At Moss Rehab, I was principal investigator in a research project that compared attention and memory functions in healthy people and people who had sustained a brain injury. I also co-lead several research projects on object perception, visual cognition, and the effects of visual affordances on action selection.

Research Fellow, August 1994-September 1998
University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, Eugene, OR

• In Oregon I worked with Mike Posner and coordinated two large research projects that investigated language functions and the effects of attention rehabilitation in traumatic brain injury populations. I learned about high-density Event-Related Potentials and project management.
• I managed and trained a group of undergraduate research assistants. I wrote articles and presented the results of my research.

Adjunct professor, March-June 1998
University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, Eugene, OR

• I taught a 400-level course on Cognition (PSY 435-545). I created a web site and an e-mail list for the class. The class web site can still be found on Geocities

Education

Doctor of Philosophy, June 1997
University of Padova, Department of General Psychology, Padova, Italy
Cognitive and Experimental Psychology

Laurea in Psychology, July 1991
University of Padova, Department of General Psychology, Padova, Italy
Graduated Cum Laude (110/110)

Selected Publications

Birnholtz, J., Steinhardt, S.B., Pavese, A. (2013). Write here, write now!: An experimental study of group maintenance in collaborative writing, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 27–May 2, 2013, Paris, France.
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Au, I., Boardman, R., Jeffries, R., Larview, P. Pavese, A., Riegelsberger , J., Rodden, K., Stevens, M. (2008). User experience at Google: focus on the user and all else will follow. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing System, ACM Press, New York, NY, US, pp. 3681-3686
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Pavese, A., & Buxbaum, L., (2002). Action matters: The role of action plans and object affordances in selection for action, Visual Cognition, 9(4), 559-590.
View/Download PDF file (496kb)

Sohlberg, M. M., McLaughlin, K., Pavese, A., & Heidrich, A., & Posner, M. I. (2000), Rehabilitation of attention disorders with Attention Process Therapy, Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 22(5), 656-76.
View/Download PDF file (156kb)

Pavese, A. & Umiltà, C. (1998). Symbolic distance between numerosity and identity modulates Stroop interference, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24(5), 1535-1545.
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Posner, M. I. & Pavese, A. (1998). Anatomy of word and sentence meaning, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 95(3), 800-905.
View/Download PDF file (240kb)

Angrilli, A., Cherubini, P., Pavese, A., & Manfredini, S. (1997). The influence of affective factors on time perception, Perception & Psychophysics, 59(6), 972-982.
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For a complete list of publications see my Vita

 

Patents

• Collaborative Electronic Document Editing (Sept 2012)
• Accessing a search interface in a structured presentation (Jul 2010)
• Retrieving and displaying information from an unstructured electronic document collection (Jul 2010)

 

References Available upon Request