Tamara Adlin, MS, is the founder and president of adlin, inc., a customer experience consulting company located in Seattle, Washington. Prior to forming her company, Tamara created the Customer Experience services team for Amazon Services, which provided complete customer research and site design services for Amazon's platform clients (including the official NBA online store, Marks & Spencer, Sears Canada, and others). Previously, she was the Senior Usability Specialist for Amazon.com, where she consulted with teams across the company to improve the user experience for Amazon.com customers, sellers, partners, and support professionals. Before she came to Amazon, Tamara was the Human-Centered Design Lead at Attenex Corporation, a legal services software company in Seattle, where she designed advanced document management interfaces. In previous positions, Tamara was the team leader for the Human-Centered Design Team at Akamai Technologies' Seattle office, INTERVU, Netpodium Corporation, and MetaBridge, where she designed interfaces for a variety of web applications and the award-winning Netpodium Interactive Broadcasting Toolset. Tamara started her user experience career as an Engineering Psychologist at the Army Research Laboratory, where she evaluated human factors issues associated with military systems.

Tamara is the co-author of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (with John Pruitt, Microsoft), which has been highly recommended by Jacob Nielsen, Don Norman, and Alan Cooper. The Persona Lifecycle includes four invited chapters from other experts in user-centered design and over a hundred sidebars written by 60+ colleagues who have used personas in their work. The book is based on six years of research, collection of insights from persona practitioners, and process development.

Tamara has been invited to speak and deliver tutorials on personas and other customer-centered design methods at a variety of industry and academic events. In 2003 and 2004, Tamara and John's two-day seminar for the Nielsen/Norman Group received the highest ratings from participants at their User Experience Conference.

Tamara holds a BA from Vassar College and an MS degree in Technical Communication from the University of Washington, where she focused on User Interface design techniques and interdisciplinary communication.

Tamara's Services

• Analysis, Evaluation, and Persona Services - Tamara helps your company take a fresh look at your existing research and use key learnings to improve your customers' understanding, products, and services.
• Strategy, Design, and Redesign Services - Tamara assesses problems, ideas, business goals, and branding objectives together from the customers' perspective to provide fresh insights and new ideas for products.
• E-commerce and Multi-Channel Retailers - Provides tools and techniques that can help everyone on your design and development teams understand and focus on the needs of your customers to provide a great customer experience.
• Start-ups With Great Ideas - Tamara helps establish a language and a set of processes to embed customer focus-and all of its benefits!-into your company from the very beginning.
• Established Web and Product Teams - Assists web or product teams that have been around for a while and needs a fresh set of ideas for a new site or product, or part of a new team that's trying to create at atmosphere of organized innovation, or trying to foster better communication between multiple organizations in your company.
• Consulting Agencies - Tamara brings unique customer-centered design expertise and methods to every client and project.
• Venture Capitalists - Helps young companies revamp their products' customer experience and build customer centrism into their company.