|| Smitha Barki ||

PROFESSIONAL
Smitha Barki is a user experience designer with expertise in information architecture, interaction design, user research, and content strategy. She has a thorough understanding of user-centered design practices and principles, and experience in information and user experience design for applications, mobile devices and the Web.

As a member of Macquarium's user experience team, Smitha has worked on various projects, from e-commerce sites to intranet portals and application design. Project responsibilities include user experience strategy, creating comprehensive architecture design, user and visual interface design, site mapping, wireframing, design presentations, and content design. Past clients include The Home Depot, AT&T/Samsung, KONE/Armedia, and Takeda/Shaw Science Partners.

Prior to Macquarium, Smitha has worked on numerous projects for the IBM Center for Global Innovation as an information architect and content strategist. Her expertise in designing for the user and solid grounding of usability principles contributed to design collaborations with researchers to create software/applications that often was the first of its kind.

She also has an extensive working knowledge of programming languages for the web such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, MySQL along with Flash and Actionscript.

ACADEMIC
Smitha received her Master of Science degree in Information Design and Technology from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. During this course in Interactive Digital Media Design, she studied and worked on several projects in Human Computer Interaction, Web Usability, Design of Online Communities, E-Learning, Accessibility, Ethnography, Graphic Design, and Video Editing. Her master's thesis involved studying Cultural Identity issues among children of Diaspora and how technology can be used as a medium to help children form a sense of identity. This was an extensive project developed in Flash MX 2004 with mySQL database and PHP.