Ellen is an expert in usability and user interface design. She has been designing, reviewing and testing user interfaces for nearly 20 years. Her most recent design projects are web applications: a network security and traffic monitoring system for Mazu Networks, an insurance servicing system for West Bend Mutual Insurance supporting independent agencies as well as home office staff, and a warehouse management system for Red Prairie.
Ellen is very experienced doing user research in work places and in people’s homes. While compiling data for WebTV research, Ellen began creating illustrated stories of study participants. The illustrated story format is now a key deliverable of research done by Gomoll Research & Design. Ellen also has extensive experience conducting and reporting on usability tests. She has conducted user research and usability testing across the country and internationally. She has tested a wide range of designs from paper prototypes to installed products. In addition to her most recent projects, customers include Charles Schwab & Company, Cisco Systems, PCTEL and Hewlett Packard.
Paper prototyping is one of Ellen’s favorite design tools and is an integral part to design projects. Ellen has created many paper prototypes for various types of products, but more importantly, has tested those prototypes with users.
Ellen has presented at the Usability Professionals’ Association annual conferences, the CHI annual conferences, and User Interface Engineering conferences. She teaches workshops on user research, design and usability. Ellen also teaches workshops for corporate customers.
Ellen began her career at Northwestern Mutual as a mainframe programmer. Later, she led projects to redesign user interfaces. As part of that work, she was one of the first in the company to perform usability tests and helped to establish user interface design guidelines. At Northwestern Mutual, Ellen pioneered the role of User Interface Designer. In that position, she helped many teams with designs and educated them on the user-centered design process and the principles of good design.
Several years later, Ellen joined Metavante Corporation, a software provider for the financial industry. She conducted research at user sites across the country, created human interface models, developed detailed window designs, directed online prototyping and performed usability testing for Banker Insight, a strategic sales and service product.
Ellen has a Bachelor of Science degree in Management Information Systems
from Carroll College.
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