---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jared Zimmerman jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org Date: Mon, May 12, 2014 at 1:05 AM Subject: Abigail Ripstra joins the the User Experience team To: wmfall@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Abbey Ripstra aripstra@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 | : @JaredZimmermanhttps://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman