Cara Winterbottom has a lifelong fascination with people, ideas, and data. This first led her toward the fields of psychology and philosophy. During this time, she discovered an interest in technology, especially how it can enable research and design around people, ideas, and data. These two strands converged when she discovered the field of user experience.
Cara has a strong academic background, with degrees in psychology and computer science. Her PhD in computer science was earned through designing, building, and user testing an authoring tool for novices to create 3D interactions for virtual environments. This sparked her interest in user experience. After an academic career of over a decade, Cara joined Flow Interactive, a leading UX agency in Cape Town, South Africa. Here, she learned how to deliver quality research and design work that leverages the best parts of academic rigor and business requirements and processes. For the past 6 years, she has worked as a freelance consultant, further developing these skills in a variety of settings and for a variety of products. The areas of user experience in which she is most interested are qualitative and quantitative research methods, especially usability testing and analysis, information architecture, and interaction design.
I would like to thank my partner, Andrew Smith, and my parents, Rosie and Peter Winterbottom, for their unwavering support while I have been immersed in writing this book. I would also like to thank my co-writer, Marli Ritter, for allowing me to share this experience with her, and for the lovely conversations we had along the way. Finally, I would like to thank Packt for giving me this opportunity, in particular, my editors, Onkar Wani and Shweta Pant, for their support and for making my writing better.