The Group

A seasoned professional with over 12 years of industry experience, Kevin enjoys the benefit of participation in a wide range of research and design projects across multiple platforms.

His basic approach to assessing user experience, though, has remained constant: user and design context matter most, but viewing them through the lens of overarching design and business goals results in the insights that contribute to truly compelling products.

Kevin was most recently in the games group at Microsoft, where he managed the relationship between user research and various development studios. In this role, he created and executed user research plans for in-development video games. Each plan was tailored to the specific needs of the studio and spanned the entire development cycle of their product. In execution, these plans required the application of rigorous qualitative and quantitative data collection, to develop clear, timely analyses, giving product teams the facts they needed to make the right decisions at the right time. Helping development partners understand the meaning of data collected from hundreds of users interacting with games over the course of many years gave Kevin something in return: Awareness of the powerful effect of fun and delight on overall consumer satisfaction - and the dramatic, negative impact, when absent.

Beyond studying traditional game interactions, while working from the inception of Kinect (Microsoft’s motion-sensing and speech recognition input device), Kevin developed new methods to assess natural user interactions, such as gesture and voice. These methods afforded foundational research on embodied interaction and voice-augmented interaction in entertainment experiences. This ultimately led to deep understanding of completely new factors, such as the effect of users’ a priori knowledge, body awareness and coordination, fatigue, effects of real-time feedback via on-screen avatars and in-game cues, as well as perceptions of enjoyment and challenge of embodied interactions and gameplay. Those learnings and approaches translate effectively to the world outside of games, to assessing the user experience on almost every currently emerging technology.

His other prior work includes research and design efforts on consumer productivity applications and web-delivered enterprise business applications. Kevin holds a degree in Computing and Software Systems from the University of Washington.

Roberto has a passion for design research, more specifically, the use of visualization methods to assist in experience analysis. He brings a decade of experience in communication design and design education. 

He has worked internationally in both Florence, Italy and Melbourne, Australia supporting successful projects for The Australasian Centre for Interaction Design, The Uffizi Gallery, The Design Research Institute at RMIT University and the State of Victoria. Previously, in Vancouver, he directed a communication design studio with a specialization in corporate identity and publication design.

As a design educator for many years, Roberto’s research focused on the facilitation of pedagogical principles and theories to design educators. He has published and presented journal articles at design research conferences in London, New York and Melbourne.

He has been an active member of the Design Research Society since 2007. 

Roberto received a Master of Communication Design degree by research from RMIT University, Melbourne. Further, he has studied Publishing and Design at Langara College and fine art at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.