User Experience, Gaining Experience
Fiona Murphy, co-founder and Director of Ireland’s first user experience (UX) design agency Frontend, recognised the need for specialist design services for interactive technology back in the 1990s.
An industrial design graduate from the National College of Art and Design, Murphy completed a master’s in interactive multimedia from the Royal College of Art in 1996. She had gone to college and was friends with Niall O’Sullivan, founder of web design and content company Nua. He asked her to run a media company for him, O’Sullivan Associates, where she gained further insights.
“Very early on I did some research into different methodologies and realised research could be a very important component in terms of informing design for technology,” she says. “This led to a strong user centric design process, which is fundamentally similar to what we still do today at Frontend.”
Autonomous Acceleration
Ireland is keen to position itself as a hub for connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technologies and to share in a global market predicted to be worth €70bn by 2035. According to John McCarthy, Leader, Intelligent Mobility at Arup, around 100,000 new jobs could be created in Ireland in direct and indirect services for CAVs by 2030. Arup is an independent firm of designers, planners, engineers, consultants and technical specialists, working across every aspect of today’s built environment.
First up, McCarthy points out that connected and autonomous vehicles are not one and the same thing. “They’re two completely different markets that touch upon each other quite strongly,” he says.
Kinzen Co-Founder Talks Real News
Áine Kerr started her a career as a political correspondent writing for national papers before becoming head of content and then managing editor at Storyful. Up until 2017 she led global journalism partnerships at Facebook in New York.
Kerr’s dedication to improving how we consume news led her organically to her next venture as co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Kinzen, a start-up developing solutions to control your news experience. Along with her co-founders Paul Watson and Storyful founder and former Twitter Ireland boss Mark Little, Kerr sought to create a news experience that the user can control and tailor to suit their needs and tastes – a personalised, authentic experience amid an era of misinformation, mistrust and fake news.Read more
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