TandemSEVEN

TandemSeven Hires Dr. Lawrence Najjar as Principal User Experience Architect

Austin, TX., May 31, 2005 - TandemSeven, a consulting firm that specializes in the usability and design of complex applications, today announced the hiring of Dr. Lawrence Najjar as Principal User Experience Architect. Based in Austin, Dr. Najjar will lead usability and design initiatives for TandemSeven's Midwest and nationally-based clientele.

"Dr. Najjar worked successfully with many different clients to resolve a wide variety of practical user interface design challenges," said Frank Torbey, Chief Executive Officer. "He brings this experience as well as passion and results-oriented drive to our client engagements."

Najjar has over 22 years of user interaction analysis and design experience. At BMC Software he added graphical user interfaces to mainframe applications and wrote a corporate accessibility user interface style guide. As a consultant at iXL and Viant, he helped create Home Depot's online store, reorganized NASCAR.com, and developed a parts order extranet for GE Power Systems customers. While at IBM, Dr. Najjar helped redesign the US air traffic controller user interface and improved the usability of several engineering management software products. He also worked with state and federal governments to build a wearable computer for poultry processing plant quality assurance inspectors, analyze a city-wide highway traffic management system, design software testing tools for fighter jets, and improve the accessibility of advanced photocopiers.

Dr. Najjar has been very active in the field of user interaction design, publishing over 50 professional papers, 24 invention disclosures, and giving dozens of presentations at professional society meetings, industry lunches, and academic classrooms. Recently, he served on the editorial board for the "Handbook of Human Factors in Web Design" and published a chapter on e-commerce user interface design. At the upcoming HCI International Conference, he is presenting a paper on accessible Java application user interface design guidelines.

Najjar has a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He also has a Master of Science and Ph.D. in Psychology with specializations in Engineering Psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology.