---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jared Zimmerman <jared.zimmerman(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, May 12, 2014 at 1:05 AM
Subject: Abigail Ripstra joins the the User Experience team
To: wmfall(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Cc: Abbey Ripstra <aripstra(a)wikimedia.org>
Everyone,
Its my great pleasure to welcome *Abigail Ripstra* to the User Experience
team. Most recently she was working as a Design & Usability Research
Analyst at Salesforce. She is excited to be part of the Wikimedia
Foundation’s mission and ongoing task of sharing knowledge and enabling our
users to more easily do so.
*Abigail joins Wikimedia Foundation as User Researcher Lead*, and will be
working with all product teams to help build and extend our ability to do
impactful qualitative research as part of our product development cycle.
She will not only grow the research team but help train all of us to do
research in a way that is consistent, useful, neutral, and most
importantly, effective in enabling decision making. In time we'll look to
Abigail to extend the team not only through hires but also through the
creation of a research internship program in collaboration with the
Grantmaking & Analytics teams modeled after the success of the legal
internship program. Our goals for qualitative research is that it can begin
to help shape our product roadmaps as well as validate and inform our
decision making processes.
Abigail has worked as a design researcher at Cisco Systems and Salesforce
collaboratively defining, testing, and iterating software functionality for
communication and collaboration. She worked at Steelcase to understand the
context, goals and needs of remote, distributed team mates. She has also
worked with a few design consultancies on various projects. For the past 11
years, she has been studying observing, researching and defining products
for people to collaborate and communicate. In a previous life, Abigail ran
her own business as a muralist, sign painter and decorative artist in
Chicago, and had several apprenticeships in graphic printmaking.
When not at work she travels the world to satisfy her curiosity about how
people communicate and collaborate in and among various political,
technological, geographic, cultural and social contexts around the world.
She is an artist and continues to paint canvases and make drawings and
prints (with ink and paint). She’s also into cooking, yoga, running on the
beach, riding a bike to get around and having adventures with friends and
family.
Abigail will be sitting with my team in the Northwest corner of the 3rd
floor, please come and introduce yourself.
Jared Zimmerman
Director of User Experience
*Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmerman<https://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman>