Brad Lehman
HCD Practitioner. Design leader. Mentor. Author.
I’m going to let you in on a not-so-secret secret. My UX career began by accident. It began because my then-girlfriend (and now wife) taught me how to code HTML for a record label I’d started with a friend in college. We needed a website. This was the time of dial-up modems and “optimized for Netscape Navigator 2.0”. I still have my yahoo email address.
Coding was fine, but it wasn’t fun, so when the opportunity came a few years later to actually move to UX and shape the products I was working on, I took the leap (and the net, as they say, appeared).
Today, I am an HCD practitioner, manager, and leader with over 25 years of private and public-sector consulting experience, the past 20 focused specifically on user experience research and design.
As a practitioner, I consider myself a UX generalist, with strengths in interaction design, workshop design and facilitation, and qualitative research design, planning, and execution (in many ways, you might think of these as the ‘UX team of one’ skills).
As a practice and team lead, I foster collaboration between designers and other stakeholders, so that teams have a clear vision and purpose. I teach organizations how to blend research and design to find simple experiences within complex processes.
As a mentor and coach, I want to help people do their work with enthusiasm and joy, and to expand their skills in ways that offer rewarding challenges, and provide a clear growth path.
In any role, I am driven by three core motivators: to learn, to teach, and to solve challenging problems.
In my spare time, I’m a home barista, community radio DJ on WOWD (94.3fm in Takoma Park, Md) and a silly dad. I also wrote a book about getting HCD done in an Agile Environment: Human-Centered Agile.