Abby Goodrum

Abby has a Bachelor's Degree in Radio, TV and Film and a Masters and PhD in Information Science. Prior to her appointment as Professor and Program Director of the User Experience Design program at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU), she held held faculty positions at Syracuse, Drexel and Ryerson, and taught User-Centered Design, Usability, UX, Knowledge Management, Information Architecture, and Digital Reference. She additionally spent time working as a researcher at CNN, and in educational technology for IBM. She was the founding Director for Social Science Research in a $23M Canadian Centre of Excellence that served as both a research network and commercialization engine in order to address complex issues in digital media and transform multidisciplinary research into user-centered solutions. Her research bridges computer science, humanities, communication studies, information management, and media studies, and focuses on understanding how humans seek, use, share, manipulate, store, retrieve, and organize digital multimedia. She is advising Syngli on its own UX design and testing, including its incorporation of gamification elements.