EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has named Kate Lawrence Vice President, User Research. Lawrence leads the User Research Team and the research activities that enable EBSCO to gain user insight and improve the customer experience across the portfolio of EBSCO products.
Lawrence has been a User Experience (UX) practitioner for more than 20 years, starting her career in health care designing online order entry systems for Brigham and Women’s Hospital, then moving into online travel, where she worked in User Experience at TripAdvisor and SilverRail Technologies.
Since 2011, Lawrence and her team at EBSCO have watched thousands of users interact with EBSCO products, mobile devices, websites and interface designs, discovering insights that drive improvements to products, services and processes. Lawrence says letting users tell their stories informs product development and challenges assumptions. “Listening to customers and users is a transformative experience. What we confirm with every study is how critical it is to bring customer and user feedback into the product development cycle, as early as possible. The other advantage is that the insights we gain about the larger picture of library usage can benefit the library community in ways we never considered.”
Lawrence contributes to EBSCO’s blog posting articles about user research at EBSCO and larger issues related to user research. Her User Research team will be speaking during EBSCO’s Lively Lunch at The Charleston Conference on November 6th and Lawrence will take part in a panel discussion at Charleston. The session, Owning the Discovery Experience for Your Patrons, will be held on Thursday, November 6th at 3:15-4:00 pm.
