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Alex O’Neal
Author of Usable Color

Alex can be seen in the wild in and around the Austin area, solving problems with design wherever she can. She began designing for the web in 1998, but worked on library databases as far back as 1991. She holds a B.Sci. in psychology, with concentrations in biology and computer science. Unsurprisingly, Alex focuses on information architecture, interaction design, and HCI in her work, specializing in complex SaaS and data visualization.

Her award-winning background includes Fortune 500 companies such as Dell and Texas Instruments, as well as the web’s oldest social network, a medical software dot com, business intelligence, telecom, and her own consulting and teaching business. She has worked as designer, researcher, instructor, front-end developer, analyst, and product owner across global cross-functional teams, but tracks her work in terms of the people on the other side of the screen: Alex has supported personas ranging from logistics planners and medical professionals to shoe buyers, students, and nostalgic veterans. Along the way her work has taken her to Austin, Seattle, Dallas, California, and even (briefly) Argentina. Currently Alex works as a principal product designer at Infor, where she designs supply chain and logistics SaaS.

Alex advocates strongly for accessible design, on screen and off. She helped found and serves as co-chair for (dis)Abled at Infor, a company resource group for people with disabilities or who are differently abled, serving both as an ally and a representative, as Alex is neurologically diverse as well as physically disabled. Her obsessions with color perception and the brain (among other things) since elementary school are not just lucky accidents for a design career, but symptomatic of her ASD. Alex’s volunteer work includes training high school girls for GENAustin’s GirlConnect, at Austin Dog Alliance, Habitat for Humanity, and serving on a variety of panels.