Irene Au MSIE 1996: Pioneer in Internet-based design

User experience design, or UX design, is the process of holistically improving a user’s interactions and reactions with a product, from unboxing to disposal.

In the context of web services, UX design is often taken for granted; websites are expected to be pleasing to the eye and rewarding to use. When Irene Au started her career, however, UX on the Internet was entirely unheard of.

Au is a designer who has worked with many prominent internet companies to make their services more accessible and useful for their users. She first encountered the ideas of UX design while attending the University of Illinois for her master’s degree in Industrial Engineering.

“I was flipping through my computer architecture book and discovered there was this whole field called ‘human factors and engineering psychology,’ where you could study the way people use technology and how they influence each other,” Au says.

She pursued faculty involved with these ideas on the Urbana-Champaign campus, such as Chris Wickens, who “literally wrote the textbook” in the field, and Penny Sanderson, who became her graduate advisor. Au then created her own program within Industrial Engineering called “Human-Computer Interaction,” where she learned engineering psychology alongside other classes like computer science.

After graduating in 1996, Au began work at Netscape, developers of the first-ever commercial web browser of the same name, where she helped design their client products such as the browser and email. “I got great mentorship there, and it was really exciting because we were bringing the internet to everyone,” she says.

One of her mentors is a notable Illini alumnus: Netscape co-founder and 1993 Illinois graduate Marc Andreessen is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser that predated Netscape, and one of six people first inducted into the World Wide Web Hall of Fame.

As Netscape fell in popularity at the hands of Internet Explorer and began its transformation into future Firefox creator Mozilla, Au was brought on by Yahoo! in 1998, which was rising in popularity but was little more than unformatted text on a screen at the time. Hired for her pioneering expertise in user-centered design, Au joined the company and constructed their UX design practice from the ground up.

“We were really the first to bring user-centered design to an Internet company and figure out what that would look like,” she says. “When I entered the workforce, that didn’t exist, so I created that.”

Au led design at Yahoo! for eight years, helping the company as it experienced massive growth but also seeing it struggle through the dot-com bust at the turn of the century. By the end of her time at Yahoo! she had amassed a team of 250 people, but the website had begun sacrificing simplicity and design for higher ad revenue, an approach counter to the philosophy she and her team had developed.

With another growing internet company catching her eye, Au joined Google in 2006 as their Global Head of User Experience Design. She took on a similar leadership role that involved coordinating a user-friendly approach across the website’s many online services. At engineering-driven Google, there was a hardly a thought given to UX design before her arrival.

“Back then, Google operated more like a federation of startups where everybody did their own thing, so it didn't feel like one company from a user's perspective,” Au says. “It was pretty much hacked together, almost like with duct tape.”

Facing these challenges, Au was in charge of unifying Google’s image and bringing an empathetic understanding of users to the company’s products. She spent the next six years coordinating these design principles for the internet giant.

By 2012 and after significant changes to the company structure, Au was looking for a way to work more intimately with smaller businesses. She left Google that year to join venture capital firm Trinity Ventures and provide her design expertise to the CEOs of startups. She also got directly involved with a budding startup called Udacity, an early provider of MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. Through both positions she was able to apply her skills to the development of businesses.

“It was the classic tale where a person has an interesting idea or technology, and the challenge is how to find the best intersection between what he has and what people need,” says Au, speaking of her time at Udacity. “This was a great opportunity for design to come in and help tell that story while designing an experience that meets people’s needs.” Udacity marked Au’s first chance to build a website’s UX design from its inception, rather than being hired to clean up a company’s pre-existing services.

Her experiences with businesses both large and small led her to her current position as an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, a prominent venture capitalist firm with the same founder as computer software company Sun Microsystems. Since 2014, Au has directed and coached many entrepreneurs on the importance of maintaining a coherent and user-centered design philosophy in their companies.

Design can be implemented into a company at several levels, says Au. Its branding and product aesthetics are important to express the intent and character of the company, but the user’s interactions and experience with the product can also be planned for.

However, she says, issues can be found even deeper, down to the people behind the product.

“Any dysfunction that a company has will manifest itself in the user interface. When you have a product that is confusing or cluttered or unclear, that's the result of a lack of clarity or focus within the company,” Au says. “Because I’ve had such deep experience managing and building design organizations, I have seen the whole range of challenges and can quickly diagnose what the problem is.”

These problems may include a lack of necessary skills, conflicts with stakeholders, or poor communication — whether with consumers or within the company itself.

“I'm coaching them to bring great leadership into the company and scale themselves,” she continues. “Ultimately my job is to get them into such great shape that I'm not needed anymore.”

While Au had to practically invent her own career in the 1990s, user-centered design now sees wide demand across industries.

“I think companies recognize that design is as important as technology, so more and more companies are investing in design,” she says. “I think more people understand that it’s more than skin deep; it’s not just how it looks but how you move through the site, what the structure is, and what the company strategy is. All of that is design.”

This recognition makes now a great time to be a designer, Au says. She sees the job as highly interdisciplinary, requiring not only skills in technology, psychology, and the arts but also a strong understanding of ethics and the humanities as technology becomes an integral part of daily life. “I think it’s a great field. It’s definitely not easy, but it’s worthwhile,” she says.

With over 20 years of groundbreaking work in UX design, Au believes the significance of her work lies in how it can benefit the user on a grander scale.

“Well-designed products and experiences save people time and bring to light joy in people’s lives, and I like to think that they also give us the chance to be a little closer to our better selves,” Au says. “People who create well-designed products have to have incredible attention and focus, as well as empathy for the people they’re building for. It’s their gift to humanity, and when we consume great design we are reminded of what it means to be mindful and empathetic, and it’s a reminder for ourselves to be that way as well.”

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