About Us
Why Neo Insight
When you need usable, effective, efficient and satisfying products or services – that's when we'd like to hear from you. That's our core competency, and it has underlies our broad range of strategic evaluation and design services for private, public and non-profit sectors. Our specialization is the user experience – specifically applying user- and usage-centred techniques for requirements analysis, design, and evaluation.
About Neo Insight
Neo Insight Inc. has been doing business since July 2001, and incorporated in March 2002. Individually we have more than 20 years of experience in the design and evaluation of user experiences. Our approach to usability testing is based not only on industry-standard principles, but also on our clients' business goals and capabilities, and an in-depth understanding of users, their goals and tasks. This ensures that our recommendations and designs are prioritized to our customers' needs and their ability to implement the solutions cost-effectively.
Our participatory and iterative approach ensures a large degree of knowledge transfer. We encourage all stakeholders to actively participate in our usability testing as observers to obtain maximum value. In addition to applying usability techniques, we teach them regularly, in our own workshops and at conferences and other events. Our workshops focus on providing a “hands-on” experience of usability testing, customized to the specific needs of our customer or audience, and immersing participants in the experience of an actual usability test.
Neo Insight is partnered internationally with Customer Carewords (owned by Gerry McGovern) and provides Customer Carewords techniques and services as the sole supplier in Canada.
Clients
Neo Insight has served clients in the public sector at federal, provincial, regional, and municipal levels. We have served a broad variety of clients in higher education, high technology, non-profit, and professional services. Since much of our work uses remote technologies, we work with clients from a variety of places, and conduct usability testing with our clients' clients from anywhere they have high speed internet. We have worked with clients in a variety of countries, in a variety of languages.
Team
Our resources are specialists in user experience and usability. Our rigorous and cost-effective approach is based on many years of observing actual behaviour. We bring multiple disciplines to bear on our projects, and bring experience with leading-edge tools and techniques, based on serving many different types of clients. Below is some information about our senior people.
Mike Atyeo
Mike has 10 years experience in retail point-of-sale and financial systems, and a further 15 years in telecommunications product and service design and design management. He built the first Interaction Design team in BT, prototyped their first multi-media applications (interactive TV and airline seat-back systems), and directed a corporate usability program. He delivered BT's new brand identity on-screen, produced Corporate 'Look and Feel' Standards, and implemented user-centered design process changes for the Consumer Products division. Since co-founding Neo Insight in 2002, Mike has led many user experience projects for government and high-tech clients.
Mike has an Honours degree in Psychology and an MSc in Computer Science. He has published and presented on Human Factors techniques at international conferences, run workshops as part of the UK Government's 'Usability Now!' initiative, and chaired CapCHI - Ottawa's Computer-Human Interaction professional chapter.
Email address: mike at neoinsight dot com
Scott Smith
Scott Smith is a co-founder of Neo Insight. He brings three decades of experience in discovering the intersection of what users really need vis-a-vis how products and services meet user needs. His experience includes usability, business analysis, qualitative research methods, product management, market analysis, and competitive strategy. Before Neo Insight he was with Nortel in the U.S. and Canada, and in telecommunications marketing.
He has conducted hundreds of workshops, user testing sessions, and discussion groups, managed portfolios of hardware, software, and services, built channels to market, and presented to thousands of customers. He has written market strategies and commercial specifications, innovated competitive intelligence techniques, written strategic plans, managed intellectual property, managed user-centred design, established trend-monitoring forums, and managed portfolios of hardware and software.
He has two patents and four pending, in the areas of video consultation (US 5,990,932), multi-service touch-screen zone-based user interface (US 6,313,853), collaborative network planning, and personalization. His design research has been published in Nortel's corporate magazine. His undergraduate B.A. honours degree is in Business, Economics, and Philosophy. His M.B.A. degree program included Operations Management, Advertising, and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota Graduate School of Management.
Email address: scott at neoinsight dot com
Eric Hutt
Eric Hutt is a usability research associate who has been with Neo Insight since September 2016 and has been engaged in usability testing and data analysis. His skillset includes both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, with a specific interest in face-to-face interviewing techniques. Eric holds a Master’s degree in Psychology and specializes in qualitative data collection and analysis. He is a published researcher and experienced presenter.
Email address: eric dot hutt at neoinsight dot com
Roy Ballantine
Roy Ballantine has been a leader in User Experience Architecture, Design, Evaluation & Testing for more than 25 years, at Nortel; Cognos; and IBM, designing products such as web applications, office telephone solutions, and complex Statutory Financial Reporting tools. He has taught several university courses and given individual lectures and symposia on aspects of User Interface Design and Evaluation. Roy holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, specializing in Visual Information Processing. He joined the Neo Insight team in September of 2013 to focus on effective and efficient methods of design evaluation and feedback.
Roy’s skills include finding usable and implementable solutions to complex UX problems in an Agile development environment; concept creation and envisioning; product and feature architecture and design; prototyping (static and functional prototypes) ; web app and desktop tool design; user needs analysis; interaction design and user experience evaluation. Roy holds two patents in design, with a third pending.
Email address: roy at neoinsight dot com
Gord Hopkins
Gordon Hopkins has been designing user experiences for over 20 years. His extensive user-centered design expertise has generated innovative designs for advanced business and residential telephones, wireless and cellular phones, remote collaboration services, telemedicine equipment, call centers, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, broadband web applications and web portals. Industry sector experience spans telecom, medicine, education, enterprise, and retail. His skills include task analysis, interaction design, heuristic analysis, rapid prototyping/simulation, usability testing, and design management.
Gord holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and has held positions in User Experience Architecture and Design Management at Nortel Networks and Communications Research Center. He established a "Center of Excellence" in interaction design at Nortel Networks, creating an ISO 9000 certified process.
Email address: gord at neoinsight dot com
