Brynn is a design research consultant and Social Interaction Lead at Bolt | Peters in San Francisco where she is responsible for formulating ethnographic-based user testing on existing products and providing experience design consulting to companies hoping to align user needs with business goals and objectives.
Social search came on her radar while she was in the Ph.D. program in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego. There she spent several years understanding the purpose and role of social interactions during information seeking activities, and how to design online systems that support collaborative question-answering. She was awarded the 2nd place prize for her research on social search at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference in 2009. Brynn is a frequent author, speaker, and advocate of social search, design thinking, remote user research, and digital anthropology.
Some of her primary user research has lead to the publications of:
In her free time, she runs the local Overlap SF chapter; she's a micro-trustee with the Awesome Foundation in SF; and she's an advisor to and judge in the Starbucks-sponsored betacup competition for redesigning the paper coffee cup.