Kara Pernice
Managing Director
Kara Pernice is the Managing Director at Nielsen Norman Group, and heads the Company's East Coast operations.
The Wall Street Journal called Pernice "an intranet guru."
Background
Pernice has more than 15 years of experience in evaluating usability in the areas of collaboration, document management, graphics and multimedia, database design, and handheld devices. More recently she has studied more consumer-oriented products such as digital cameras, cell phones, and cappuccino makers. She has also been a user interaction designer for products ranging from Web calendar applications, to dictation devices for radiologists, to server monitoring programs.
Before joining NN/g she established successful programs at Lotus Development, Iris Associates (an IBM subsidiary), and Interleaf. She managed the first user experience program for the Lotus Notes Client, Designer, and Domino Server products. And, after her team worked on R5, PC Magazine wrote, "If this were summer camp, Lotus Notes would walk away with the Most Improved Camper award."
Pernice has been involved in planning and designing state-of-the-art usability labs; has conducted hundreds of lab studies; many remote studies, field studies, and surveys. She may be best known for practicing and championing using video in usability, as a tool for analyzing, presenting, and teaching.
Pernice chaired the Usability Professionals' Association 2000 and 2001 conferences, and served as 2002 conference advisor. She holds an M.B.A. from Northeastern University and a B.A. from Simmons College.
NN/g Projects
Since joining Nielsen Norman Group, Pernice has led many major NN/g intercontinental research studies and then generated design guidelines and co-authored the reports about those studies. Some of these include:
- Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations, a series of studies about how journalists use the Web, and how to design sites for these users. Pernice conducted qualitative studies on 18 websites with 32 journalists, in New York City, Boston, London, and Copenhagen.
- Intranet Design Annuals 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, compilations of each year's winners of the Nielsen Norman Group annual intranet design contest. Pernice judged the submissions for the award and co-authored the reports.
- Intranet Usability, studies went behind the scenes of fourteen intranets by conducting usability test sessions with actual employees at the intranet sites. 149 users participated in the studies in the USA, Canada, the U.K., Hong Kong, The Netherlands, Finland, and Switzerland.
- Web Usability for Senior Citizens, studies with 44 people over the age of 65 in the U.S. and in Japan. This segment represents a growing population of Web users and this study's goal was to define and address the Web design issues than can arise for this group. Pernice led the research study and conducted many of the evaluations.
- Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to use for Users with Disabilities, a study about people who use assistive technology and the Web. Pernice led the team conducting this research study, and facilitated many of the sessions. More than 100 users participated, in New York City, Boston, California, and Japan. More than 20 websites were evaluated, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.
- Pernice also worked with UsableNet to implement guidelines from this report into a software program for developers that automatically checks, and in some cases fixes, usability-related accessibility issues.
- How to Conduct Usability Evaluations for Accessibility, a report with recommendations and tips for conducting usability evaluations in the field and in a lab, with people who use assistive technology.
Pernice has presented tutorials, lectures, and conference keynotes on a wide range of topics including all of the above, plus an assortment of usability techniques, usability management and lifecycle, and the politics of usability, to name a few.
She has worked with clients in various industries including publishing, technology, financial, pharmaceutical, insurance, entertainment, and government.