Bio

Tamara is a founding partner of Fell Swoop, a user experience strategy & design agency in Seattle. Before creating Fell Swoop, was the president of adlin, inc., her own consulting company, where she worked with clients “from Apple to Zillow” to help them understand their customers and design accordingly. Prior to forming her company, Tamara created the Customer Experience services team for Amazon Services, which provided complete customer research and site design services for Amazon’s platform clients (including the official NBA online store, Marks & Spencer, Sears Canada, and others). Previously, she was the Senior Usability Specialist for Amazon.com, where she consulted with teams across the company to improve the user experience for Amazon.com customers, sellers, partners, and support professionals. Before she came to Amazon, Tamara was the Human-Centered Design Lead at Attenex Corporation, a legal services software company in Seattle, where she designed advanced document management interfaces. In previous positions, Tamara was the team leader for the Human-Centered Design Team at Akamai Technologies' Seattle office, INTERVU, Netpodium Corporation, and MetaBridge, where she designed interfaces for a variety of web applications and the award-winning Netpodium Interactive Broadcasting Toolset. Tamara started her user experience career as an Engineering Psychologist at the Army Research Laboratory, where she evaluated human factors issues associated with military systems.

Tamara is the co-author of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (with John Pruitt, Microsoft), which has been highly recommended by Jacob Nielsen, Don Norman, and Alan Cooper. The Persona Lifecycle includes four invited chapters from other experts in user-centered design and over a hundred sidebars written by 60+ colleagues who have used personas in their work. The book is based on 6 years of research, collection of insights from persona practitioners, and process development.

Tamara has been invited to speak and deliver tutorials on personas and other customer-centered design methods at a variety of industry and academic events. Since 2003, Tamara and John’s two-day seminar for the Nielsen/Norman Group continues to receive the highest ratings from participants at their User Experience Conference.

Tamara holds a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.S. degree in Technical Communication from the University of Washington, where she focused on User Interface design techniques and interdisciplinary communication.

What People Say About Tamara

I worked with Tamara at Amazon.com, where she quickly became one of the most respected customer advocates in the company. Tamara is a great person to bring in to your product development efforts. She not only champions user-centered design processes and persona development, but knows how to take concepts and principles and turn them into real results for your customers."

Jessica Scheiback, Vice President, Products, Jobster

Tamara is a great asset in the world of customer experience. It was truly a great professional pleasure to meet and work with her after hearing her speak at industry events. If you are serious about delivering great customer experiences, you must talk to Tamara!

Mila Goodman, Director, Retail Strategic Services, Resource Interactive

Tamara has deep expertise in persona development and user experience design - and delivers on her promise to take the dissonance out of product development. She is remarkably talented, passionate and curious. And she has an incredible ability to coach executives and product people to consensus. The result of working with Tamara is an exec and product team focused on the key customers that will move your business forward."

Sonia Meisenheimer, Consultant, SoniaM

Publications

The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
John Pruitt & Tamara Adlin
Buy at Amazon

Contributor: Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results
Bryan Eisenber, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa T. Davis
Buy at Amazon

Contributor: The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook
by Andrew Sears (ed.) and Julie A. Jacko (ed.)
Chapter 51: Putting Personas To Work: Using Data-Driven Personas To Focus Product Planning, Design, and Development
Tamara Adlin & John Pruitt
Buy at Amazon