Denise Belling
Senior User Experience Consultant

Email: denise.belling(at)optimalexperience.com

The professional

Denise has been engaged in user experience consulting for over 12 years. She enjoys working with clients to customise user-centred design methods and activities into full life cycle project deliveries. Her experience includes a wide variety of organisations and industries, in both Australia and the UK. Denise is an enthusiastic analyst of all things human-behaviour related and enjoys the challenge of integrating the real world into intuitive interaction designs.

She also has exceptional skills in interpreting body language and behaviour in contextual research and usability evaluation sessions. She uses this skill to translate research into very user friendly interaction designs. This was proven in a recent project where an application she designed (and subsequently project managed throughout build and rollout) was able to be delivered to users without an expected training budget being used. It didn’t require training, because it just made sense to its audience!

Denise also has a passion for coaching and mentoring. She is very enthusiastic about the positive psychological benefits that arise from valuing people and the ‘human factors’ throughout the user experience research, analysis and design process, as well as within client and project teams.

Denise joined Optimal Experience in early 2010 after several years operating as a freelance consultant. And before that she was a Senior Consultant for The Hiser Group.

Some of Denise’s recent clients include:

• BT Financial Group (where she collaborated with a vast number of internal and external stakeholders to design a portal that successfully balances the needs of the business with those of the users)
• South Yorkshire Travel (UK)
• Australian Federal Police
• Fairfax Digital
• National Prescribing Service
• And past projects with: Air Services Australia – Air Traffic Control; AMP; and various government departments

Denise is active in the user experience and usability professional community. She has been both Vice President and Treasurer of the Usability Professionals’ Association *UPA), Sydney Chapter and a member of the Computer Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG)

She has a double major degree in Commerce from the University of the Wollongong, NSW. She also has a Certificate IV in Training, certificates in interaction design and information architecture and a Life Coaching certification.