About Leah Buley

Hi, it’s me, Leah 👋. I have been described as the Chrissie Hynde of UX, a Ferrari who can do the work of a pickup truck, and Nancy Kerrigan’s lookalike. Are any of those a compliment? I don’t know. Well, maybe the first one.

In 20+ years in the user experience field, I have held just about every role in the stack: front end developer, user interface designer, information architect, researcher, strategist, and market analyst covering the UX field itself. My #1 takeaway from all those experiences is that all good product starts with good research. These days, I’m a Director of User Research at Lovevery, a startup that makes products for curious kids and busy parents.

My experience spans agencies, startups, and Fortune 100 companies. I was previously a Director of Design at InVision. There, I created a propriety design maturity model based on data from over 2000 companies globally to identify the design practices that to tie business impact. My research has been published in HBR, Forbes, Communication Arts, Tech.eu, and Information Age.

Before that, I was a principal analyst at Forrester Research, and a design strategist in Intuit’s Design Innovation Group, where I led strategic design projects across the organization. I learned everything I know about user experience at the pioneering UX consultancy Adaptive Path, where I spent my formative years as a UX practitioner.

Adaptive Path was known for developing and promoting new techniques, and what I learned there I later turned into a book,The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide. It’s a guide for design-minded individuals to work cross-functionally to produce better experiences for customers. It is frequently used as an introductory text in college courses on human centered design.

My talks and workshops at venues like SXSW, UX Week, and UX London have a reputation for being high-energy, hands on, and just a little bit quirky.