Last week, we kicked off our new interview series with women of Cooper, a user experience design firm in New York and San Francisco, with our interview with User Experience Director Shannon McGarity. This week we're talking to Jenea Hayes who is a Practice Director and Interaction Designer based out of San Francisco!
When Jenea was growing up, she loved science and technology, building apps with HyperCard and taking apart and rebuilding her family's Mac II and regularly visiting and later working at San Francisco's Exploratorium. A college class called "Vision and the Brain" sparked her interest in cognitive psychology. While she was in grad school at Stanford in the late 90s, Jenea became interested in human-computer interaction and its career possibilities. That ultimately took her to Cooper, where she's spent the last ten years as an interaction designer, where her career has grown to include leading projects, mentoring younger colleagues, and bringing big-picture thinking to her clients.
Jenea Hayes fell in love with cognitive psychology in college, but her interest in technology started even earlier, when she'd take apart (and put back together) her family Mac II in grade school. She got her start as a professional communicator with a high school job at San Francisco's Exploratorium. At Cooper, her's combined those skills as an interaction designer, someone who "uses her obsession for what makes people tick to synthesize key details while keeping the whole system in mind."
