Irene Au is currently Director of User Experience at Google, where her team is responsible for design and user research for Google's products worldwide. She joined Google following eight years at Yahoo! where she founded Yahoo!'s user research and interaction design practice and eventually assumed worldwide responsibility for all product and platform design efforts as Vice President of User Experience and Design. Her career began at Netscape Communications where she was an interaction designer and led cross-product design efforts on Netscape's browser, mail/news client, and page editor. Irene is dedicated to raising the strategic value of design and user research within software companies through better methods and practices, processes, leadership, and quality.