Christian Rohrer

My formal education was in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Education and User Interface Design. I got my start in the tech industry in the late 1980s, helping customers install, configure and administer UNIX systems, which lead me to teaching professionally on these subjects. Realizing I didn't know as much about how people learn how to use technology, I returned to school to get a PhD from Stanford in the early 1990s, focusing on that very question. This opened me up to a whole new field I was previously unaware of: human-computer interaction. The shift for me was a focus on the design of technology, rather than instructing people how to use technology. My dissertation dealt with the attributes of user interfaces that make them learnable, and the learning strategies people employed to figure them out. I now pursued a career in the user experience industry across several tech companies in Silicon Valley and beyond, both as a practitioner and a leader. I have managed teams ranging from 5 to 80 and outside services budgets from $500,000 to $4.5 million per year. As a leader, I have specialized in attracting and retaining top UX and Product talent and developing them to reach their full potential. I authored a popular framework for understanding user research methods for the Nielsen Norman Group(https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/) and more recently I pioneered a new method for scoring the usability of any product or service (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/pure-method/).

My focus at the University is to develop future professionals who create and design technology to do so by accounting for the nature of people and their capabilities in order to maximize effectiveness and truly meet human needs.