Kelly Goto is an American entrepreneur specializing in
user experience design and
contextual research. She was one of the first design researchers using design ethnography. She is the founder and principal at gotomedia and gotoresearch.
Education and early life
Goto was born in
Seattle,
Washington, and moved to
Mercer Island,
Washington in her early childhood.
She got her first freelance design contracts in fifth grade. She studied radio, television and film at
Northwestern University and obtained her
bachelors of arts in
communications from the
University of California, Los Angeles in 1992.
[International Council of Design. (2004). Kelly Goto: gotomedia. ''Design Graphics Australia'', Number 108, 40-48.]
Career and research
Goto was hired as a senior producer of
Warner Bros' online division in
Los Angeles 1995, which was the first online presence of a
major film studio
Major film studios are production and distribution companies that release a substantial number of films annually and consistently command a significant share of box office revenue in a given market. In the American and international markets, the ...
. She moved to
San Francisco,
California in 1999 to become
creative director at Red Eye Digital Media, which later became Idea Integration. As creative director she became more interested in the intersection of
user experience and design, and was an early proponent of
usability testing on the
internet. Goto founded gotomedia in 2001 in San Francisco, which initially focused on user experience on the web, and later expanded to mobile design and to multi-faceted user-design for technology, health care, education and other sectors.
Goto was the president of the
AIGA Brand Experience in 2006-2007. She founded gotoresearch in 2015, which conducts user centered research based drawing from design thinking and ethnographic research methods.
Goto is known for her book originally published in 2002 with collaborator Emily Cotler, ''Web Redesign: Workflow that Works.'' The book, which has been translated into 14 languages and has used in university curricula, argues that the creation of the ideal user experience is an iterative process, and provides practical advice on project workflow and redesign strategies.
Goto emphasizes diversity in her approach to user design research, focusing on both cross-cultural design and universal and inclusive design, particularly focusing on how to understand and create the best user experiences for people of color, older people, women, and people with disabilities. She was one of the earliest proponents of design ethnography, using methods such as diary studies, and has spoken and written on this topic since the early 2000s. She also is involved in international and cross-national user design research and has led organizations around the world in design thinking workshops.
Personal life
Kelly lives in a multigenerational
Japanese-American household with her mother and two daughters in the Seattle area.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Goto, Kelly
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
People from Seattle
American people of Japanese descent
Northwestern University alumni
University of California, Los Angeles alumni