Angela Schmeidel Randall

Angela Schmeidel Randall is the president and founder of Normal Modes, a firm based in Texas that specializes in user experience design and usability testing.

Angela has more than 15 years of experience in user interface design, user experience development and usability testing with complex, data-driven websites and applications. She began her career in financial services with AIM Management Group Inc., a mutual fund company later acquired by INVESCO. During her time at AIM, she joined the newly-formed eCommerce group where she designed the user interface for the company's first online customer account portal.

Angela then worked with Continental Airlines to redesign and upgrade the airline's customer-facing systems. In addition to developing personas and defining use case scenarios, she conducted usability testing using a variety of methods, including formal usability testing, A/B testing with paper prototypes, magnitude estimation, eye tracking and heuristic evaluations. She used data gathered from these studies to create user experiences for the hotel and car booking engines, a new customer portal (OnePass' My Account) and the industry's first AJAX-driven frequent flyer engine. She later designed and tested the caller experience for the first voice-automated flight-booking engine. All systems remain widely used today.

Since founding Normal Modes in 2009, Angela has worked on numerous user experience design and usability testing projects for applications ranging from electronic healthcare records to oil trading platforms to e-commerce systems for commercial and government use.

Angela is a member of the Usability Professionals' Association. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of St. Thomas, and a master's degree from Rice University. Her master's thesis was an ethnographic study, conducted in China, of people's interactions with healthcare systems.

Areas of Specialization:

• Usability testing, including heuristic evaluation
• User interface (UI) design
• Information architecture (IA)
• Process automation
• Program & project management

A portfolio of her previous work is available here.

Memberships & Certifications

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