Hoa Loranger
Director
Hoa Loranger is a Director at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the San Diego office. She consults with many large, well-known companies in various industries such as entertainment, finance, technology, e-commerce, government, and intranets. She conducts usability research worldwide and gives keynotes and tutorials on a wide range of topics, including usability principles and guidelines, user-centered design concepts, and applied research methodologies. She has worked with clients to successfully implement user-centered design strategies leading to improved sales and ROI.
Before joining NN/g, Loranger served as Human Factors Lead at Intuit, where her group was responsible for the user interaction and visual design for the TurboTax product line. At TRW (currently Northrop Grumman), she specialized in both hardware and software systems, including navigational and logistical applications, and computer configurations for military vehicles.
Loranger is coauthor of the book Prioritizing Web Usability.
Her extensive research has spanned the globe including Asia, Australia, and Europe. She produces training videos and authors reports that include guidelines on:
- B2B usability — the special considerations in designing more customer-centric sites in the business-to-business sector.
- Flash-Based Applications — How to make Flash applications more aligned with human behavior and thus easier to use.
- Teenagers on the Web — Guidelines for creating compelling websites for teens.
- "About Us" — How to present information about a company or organization on its website.
- Investor Relations — How business and private investors, financial analysts, and financial journalists research financial information on the Internet, and contains guidelines on how to meet user needs on your company website.
- Public Relations (PR) — How journalists use corporate websites to find information for their articles, with guidelines on how to increase the PR value of your website.
- Location Finders — How to help users find a company's stores, offices, or other physical locations on websites.
- Paper Prototyping — This training video demonstrates how to design and build paper prototypes of user interfaces in order to get early usability data from testing with real users.
Loranger holds a Masters degree in Human Factors and Applied Experimental Psychology from California State University, Northridge, and a BA in Psychology from University of California, Irvine.