Apple Human Factors

I worked on the Human Engineering team under the Wireless Design umbrella, which was developed as a special ops group to handle the impact of the human body and natural usage on various over-the-air projects. As such, our team was directly responsible for developing and delivering human factors research for wireless products, which includes many if not all of Apple hardware.

During my 5 years at Apple, I was promoted from Human Factors Engineer III to HF Design Researcher IV. Our team expanded from a special projects group of 6 (when I was hired) to the central “User Studies” at Apple team of 37 researchers. My work spanned ID, HID, HI, PD, and many other orgs, requiring various study types from exploratory to validation protocols. I moved from sharing in-house research output to RF engineers to presenting research up to SVPs at Apple independently. I was an Apple mentor, led our team of 7 engineers across iPad studies, interviewed new candidates, and developed our User Studies at Apple program with our internal HF engineering team.

Across research initiatives, I partnered directly with the PM, engineers, designers, or other researchers to advise and execute on research asks. Any question that involved how a human might interface with our existing or developing technologies. As such, I had the opportunity to impact a wide range of products across my tenure and partner with some truly amazing individuals: from chemical analysis to acoustics to industrial design.

I feel fortunate to have worked with some of the brightest and most talented people during my time at Apple, and am honored to have been able to work as hard and fast as I did with them. My time taught me to adapt quickly to a very rigorous, technical environments, trust my intuition, and to have rigor and poise in highly pressurized and political minefields.