Who We Are: Irene Au

Director of User Experience, Google

Irene Au is dedicated to raising the strategic value of design and user research within software companies through better methods and practices, processes, leadership, and quality.  She is Director of User Experience at Google, where her team is responsible for design and user research for Google’s products worldwide.  Prior to Google, she spent eight years at Yahoo! where she was Vice President of User Experience and Design.  At Yahoo!, Irene established the interaction design and user research practice, and led product and platform design efforts worldwide.  Irene also headed up the Product Practices team which coached teams on Agile development practices and developed product operations programs to help business units deliver on corporate strategy. 

Prior to Yahoo!, Irene was at Netscape Communications, where she was an interaction designer and led cross-product design efforts on Netscape’s browser, mail/news client, and page editor.  Irene hold an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction through the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.