Mentors

UX Tuesday mentors are User Experience (UX) Consultants who have extensive experience working with start ups and who understand their unique demands and constraints.

Our two founding consultants are:

Martina Schell and Leisa Reichelt

If you’re interested in joining our team of UX Mentors or if you’d like to be a guest speaker please get in touch.

Mentors Bios:

Martina Schell (@polaroidgrrl) specialises in user-centered design (UCD), experience strategy and design research. She has over thirteen years experience in interactivity for web, desktop and devices, with a background in brand development.

Her experience spans the full breadth of the UCD lifecycle, including qualitative research to inform insight and strategy, personas & scenarios, information architecture, interaction design and visual design. Martina enjoys introducing User Experience practice into companies, and leads multi-disciplinary teams on cross-cultural research and design projects around the world.

She has helped Fortune 500 and start-up companies across a wide range of sectors develop new products and services, or measurably improve existing ones.

Her clients include Travelocity, lastminute.com, Expedia, GNER/NatEx, British Airways, O2, Vodafone, Yahoo! Mobile, Motorola, Nokia, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Gumtree, Play.com, Marks and Spencer, John Lewis, Walmart, Akbank, Royal Bank of Scotland, FIFA, Pepsi, Lufthansa, EDF Energy, John Brown Publishing and a number of start-ups.

She has worked for boutique UX consultancy, creative agency, world leading dotcom and start-up environments. Currently she works with a start-up to develop their product and leaner UX methods.

Martina holds a MA in Applied Imagination from Central Saint Martins, where she conducted research into methods for multi-disciplinary collaboration and adoption of user-centered thinking to support creativity and innovation.

She is a member of the UK UPA committee and a co-organiser of UXcampLondon. She regularly speaks on User Experience, e.g. at UPA, Product Tank, Enterprise Search London, PechaKucha and APA Digital Breakfast. Martina mentors at Seedcamp, School of Communication Arts 2.0 and UCL.

Leisa Reichelt (@leisa) left the agency and consulting world four years ago in order to concentrate finding ways to help start ups get more access to good user experience consultancy.

She has a background in formal User Centred Design, Design Research and Information Architecture combined with a passion for making these practices more accessible and more successful for companies with limited time or resources, and for those who work using Agile or Lean methodologies.

Leisa’s clients range from the rather large (including Virgin Atlantic, BBC, SonyBMG, HSBC, The Economist, Premier Foods, Pizza Express) , to the small but growing (including AMEE, Anobii, Bright Pearl, Moo, Quidco, SkimLinks, TouchNote), to open source communities (Leisa works extensively with the Drupal community and is currently spearheading ‘The Prairie Initiative’ – a social architecture and collaboration initiative).

Leisa is a regular speaker and workshop-giver and has spoken at conferences including London IA, UX London, dConstruct, Drupalcon, EuroIA, Future of Web Apps, Web 2.0 Expo, Next, Interesting, GUADEC, Interaction, and Reboot. She has mentored at Seedcamp and coordinates the London UX Bookclub.

Leisa holds a Masters of Interactive Multimedia from the University of Technology, Sydney where she was particularly interested in innovative design research methodologies and the evolution of identity in online communities.

She is writing a book on Strategic User Experience , working on her very own start up, freelance UX consulting, playing with her two small boys, and when time permits and inspiration hits, blogs at Disambiguity.