About Midwest Research

Midwest Research, LLC, is a woman-owned business located in North Eastern Ohio. We are within easy driving distance to Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Midwest Research has a network of designers, developers, usability specialists and other contractors who augment our staff on projects as needed.

Our experience includes work with government, non-profit, and private sector clients including Fortune 500 clients in industries such as: automotive; education (classroom and e-learning); financial; fine art; health care/medical; human resources; insurance; manufacturing; real-estate; and retail. Projects have included: websites, iPhone apps, complex applications, transactional websites, intranet portals, and consumer products.

---

Carol J. Smith, Lead Consultant

Carol Smith is a regular presenter at conferences, has taught usability courses at the college level and has managed a usability department. She is also the Treasurer and Director of Chapters for the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) Board of Directors. Carol has a MS in Human-Computer Interaction and has over nine years of usability experience.

Carol is an expert session facilitator who naturally puts participants at ease. She works with children and adults in their homes, schools, offices and in usability labs. Carol enjoys leading both structured and discovery sessions.

Carol takes the time to understand user's needs and behaviors and then creates tools that convey this information in an easy to understand format. She then works with organizations to integrate users needs and behaviors directly into development projects.

Carol on LinkedIn

---

Project Timing

It is never too early to involve Midwest Research in your project. Before you have requirements gathered Midwest Research can determine your user's needs and help your team integrate those findings into your requirements documents. We can also do our work later in the development process, though our effectiveness diminishes the further along in development a project is. We are most effective when we come in at the planning stages to help make sure your timeline allows for both research before, and iteration during, development.

Project Size

We have worked with very small non-profits and very large Fortune 500 corporations. Some projects only last a week or two and others may last many months. Contact us to find out what we can do to help your project be successful, on-time and on-budget regardless of its size. If the project is not a match we’ll try to help you find someone who can successfully support you.

---

Midwest Research's Mission

• To provide our clients with insights from real people in real situations, and translate these into innovative solutions.
• To define and create smart experiences which are intuitive, exciting, and delightful.
• To establish excellent working relationships with our clients where communication, teamwork, and integrity are fundamental.
• To conduct thorough research: carefully and precisely analyze all data prior to writing reports and making recommendations.
• To treat all research participants with respect and empathy, believing that they hold the answers to our research questions and business success.

Benefits of Partnering with Midwest Research

• Experience: Midwest Research's consultants have both depth and breadth of experience with excellent educational backgrounds.
• Understandable Findings: We present our findings in plain language so that they are easy to understand. This allows you to make changes to your interface or product, leading to significant improvements in the user's experience.
• Team Augmentation: Too much work? Waiting for budget to hire? Midwest Research will partner with you, learn your process and support your team as needed.
• Cost: Midwest Research's services are affordable. We keep our costs low by working with you to carefully assess your needs. We create accurate proposals before work begins so you know what to expect.

Associates

Lisa Battle, Interaction Design Consultant

Lisa Battle has 15 years of experience in eliciting user needs, designing to support user performance, and leading successful user-centered design projects. She has designed usable software, web-based applications, and web sites for clients in a variety of industries and in the federal government. She is also an expert on accessibility, which makes products and services easier to use for people with disabilities.

Ms. Battle has presented on accessibility, usability, requirements engineering, semantic web, and strategic design at numerous conferences, including UPA, HCI International, Society for Technical Communication (STC), ASSETS, Extreme Markup, and the Government Solutions Conference. She is the author of two book chapters as well as articles in Performance Improvement and the IBM Systems Journal. In her six years of consulting with the U.S. Social Security Administration, she was instrumental in institutionalizing usability and creating a center of excellence for user-centered design within that agency. Ms. Battle holds a master's degree in Cognitive Psychology/Human Factors from George Mason University. Ms. Battle is the Principal at Design for Context.

Rachel Sengers, Interaction Design Consultant

Rachel Sengers is an interaction designer and information architect with over 10 years of experience designing Web-based applications and sites for a variety of clients in the communications and financial industries, the federal government, and other sectors. She helps clients to clarify project goals, plans how users will move through a site and accomplish their tasks, specifies the details of the user interface, and then monitors development to ensure project requirements are implemented.

Ms. Sengers has experience with all stages of the user-centered design process, including gathering requirements, prototyping, visual design, user testing, section 508 compliance, and production. Her background includes many years as a Design Director, guiding a team of designers and developers at a web design company. She is completing a graduate certificate program in Information Design at University of Baltimore, and is an active volunteer with the Washington, DC Chapter of the Usability Professionals' Association.