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Testimonials

Katy Klein is the founder and lead user research specialist for Klein Research. Since 1996, she has developed and facilitated over 300 user evaluations, comprising over 3000 interviews with individual users.

Katy Klein's work experience encompasses the retail, high-tech, financial services, design, and healthcare industries. Through her consultation, she has helped companies improve a variety of products.

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"Katy has conducted several user research and usability testing projects for us. She always does an amazing job, from planning the study, moderating the sessions and communicating the findings. She is a superb moderator. The reports that she provides are insightful and provide the right level of detail. The service that Katy provides continually exceeds our expectations. I highly recommend Katy."

"Katy’s expertise and professionalism in designing our usability studies was a key to the success of our project. She assisted us in recruiting and screening participants, scheduling and moderating interviews, and compiling and summarizing the results. The result was several insights into our website, which will lead to an improved experience for our customers."

"Working with Katy has been a collaborative and illuminating partnership. She creates an atmosphere that allows users to feel candid and at ease, allowing for feedback that is clear and complete. She has a wonderfully warm, humorous, and insightful personality that allows users to tell her their true feelings and opinions. She is flexible to client needs while providing the objectivity necessary for accurate results.

She has an ease and friendliness that makes people (who are being observed - which is difficult) feel comfortable and intelligent!"

"I've worked with Katy Klein for over ten years and I've watched her facilitate over a thousand usability interviews. Her professional and friendly manner enables her to extract the best data possible from participants. Her observation skills are top-notch and the written reports she produces are concise and enlightening.

She is highly intelligent and able to grasp the details of complex interfaces with very little lead time.

If I needed someone to conduct a usability study for a product, any product, I would feel 100% confident in using her services."

"Katy Klein did a superb job in developing, moderating, and summarizing our usability research project. I was impressed with the way she distilled the most useful information from each individual participant. And her ability to maintain a fresh, engaging conversational style throughout hours of one-on-one interviews had me asking for her brand of coffee!

The report that she assembled was a valuable resource for my organization and had a direct, positive impact on the project."

"Katy, thanks again for an outstanding job on the usability sessions; your consistency and clarity across all the users was great. I think we've uncovered and clarified some important product directions and can hopefully produce a design that will delight the end-users. We are still working through the findings and user comments in the report you sent but I have to let you know that feedback on the quality and detail of your work has been very positive. Thanks for such a good job."

"Katy brings mastery and insight to the many facets of planning, conducting and analyzing results from usability studies. The care she takes setting up a context where participants feel comfortable and free to share their ideas, feelings and responses elicits comprehensive and actionable findings. Her study results have been key in shaping product development decisions that we found to significantly improve the customer experience. Having worked with Katy over the past 5 years, I recommend her highly. She's a delight to work with - a wonderful person and consummate pro."

"Katy is a highly skilled and experienced usability consultant. I worked with her during the development of both Web and kiosk based user interfaces for large corporate brands. She was very adept at the entire usability process from recruting the right panel, to providing objective and unbiased moderating of one-on-one sessions, to the final presentation of results that helped my team and clients improve the user experiences dramatically. I highly recommend Katy and hope to have the opportunity to work with her again."

"I have worked with Katy over the last 10 years and always found her to be extremely professional. She works closely with me to understand the product and the objective of the testing. When working with clients, she has a gift for asking simple questions that provide tons of useful data. I'm excited to work with Katy any time I get the chance!"

"Katy came up to speed quickly on a complicated system administration product and guided us through the development of a comprehensive testing script. During testing, her friendly and enthusiastic personality kept our participants at ease as they worked through tasks. In the end, she delivered a thorough analysis which allowed us to pinpoint areas for improvement."

"Great human-centered design depends on insight into user needs-needs that users aren't always able to articulate. Katy Klein draws this information out of individuals thoroughly, while never appearing canned. She is especially adept at navigating detours, whether it is following a subject's unexpected point of view toward a nugget of information or handling the occasional wild card with aplomb. Katy's work helped us make significant refinements to a major financial service's website."

"Hi Katy,
We wanted to thank you for helping PGP in its first steps towards making usable software. Your final reports were excellent. I think our effort got good visibility throughout the company. We've got management thinking about real user issues now. We've also got the marketing juggernaut trying to figure out how to advertise that we do usability ;) We look forward to working with you again."

"Katy is excellent at her job. She is smart, experienced, and a true talent at facilitating evaluations. While highly professional, she is extremely down to earth. She is flexible and has the ability to work with a broad range of people and products. Katy's welcoming personality sets participants at ease and creates a positive and constructive work environment for project members."

"Katy brings an efficient and professional approach to usability and research. She quickly grasps the issues you need to explore and prepares a thorough test plan.

Her excellent test demeanor shows an ability to probe the user's thoughts in a way that ensures you get real insight from the testing. The final report is always thorough and provides practical recommendations.

You really cannot go wrong with Katy Klein."

"Katy Klein offers great depth of usability experience and a breadth of user interface design knowledge. Those qualities, combined with her professional demeanor and creative problem-solving, always make her an invaluable part of our project team."

"Katy,
I found you to be a highly qualified practitioner equipped with practical advice, well structured studies, and a natural ability to put subjects at ease and guide them through the usability process. You worked with me as a teammate and not simply as a client; you asked questions of me and didn't just run with the questions (survey) that I had prepared. This provided me with a high-level of trust and the knowledge that you understood the importance of the lab results."

"Katy has organized and facilitated customer usability sessions for several of my Schwab project teams. Katy is always very prepared, a great participant moderator, and ultimately provides data that is very important to our product development process. The results from Katy's usability sessions have helped to maximize the benefit and usefulness of many Schwab.com research tools."

"I've had the pleasure to work with Katy Klein at the usability labs at Charles Schwab. She was both personable and professional. When conducting studies, she had a remarkable skill at putting the end users at ease and facilitated our ability to gain useful information. I believe any organization would be fortunate to have Katy."

"Thanks, Katy, for allowing me to participate in your Usability project. I am impressed with the professional way you set up the work session and how you were able to make it so enjoyable. I also learned a lot, which, as I mentioned, was one of my objectives."