Kendra Shimmell

Kendra Shimmell is an experience designer for Adaptive Path. She’s extremely observant, tuning into both implicit and explicit communication between people, places, and things to uncover design opportunities. She makes sense of these opportunities in the context of culture, infrastructure, trends, and technology. Kendra believes that great design is never achieved in isolation, but as the result of partnerships.

Kendra’s experience bridges both physical and screen-based products, and service design. She has led diverse projects including the design of health care systems, retail environments, medical devices, durable goods, consumer electronics, financial services, and enterprise management applications. As a researcher, she has led large-scale ethnographic and qualitative programs in the U.S., Asia, and Europe.

Professional Background

Prior to joining Adaptive Path, Kendra worked for Lextant, an innovation consultancy for six years, where she was a Director of Design Research and User Experience Design. Before joining Lextant, Kendra was a business analyst and interaction designer with Nationwide Insurance & Financial, where she worked on both insurance and financial management tools for agents and brokers, as well as the consumer facing Nationwide.com, ranked by Gomez in the top three insurance sites for ease of use and overall performance for two consecutive years. Prior to Nationwide, Kendra worked with the Capital Square Review and Advisory Board (CSRAB) at The Ohio Statehouse to create tools to educate grades K-12 about the lawmaking process, and with Technology Enhanced Learning and Research (TELR) at The Ohio State University to design better solutions for distance learning.

Past clients come from a broad range of industries and include Cardinal Health, CheckFree (now part of Fiserv), Cordis Cardiology (Johnson & Johnson), Dell, Diebold, Ethicon Endo-Surgery, GE Healthcare, Hewlett-Packard, Hollister, Hunter, Microsoft, Moen, Nationwide Insurance & Financial, and Victoria’s Secret.

Kendra holds a Bachelor of Science (Hons.) in Design from The Ohio State University. She is active in the design community and sits on the Board of Directors of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). She has participated in the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) mentorship program. Kendra speaks at industry conferences and events and has been a guest lecturer for the Department of Design at The Ohio State University (OSU).

Kendra started dancing at age five, and continues to use her knowledge of movement and choreography to push the discipline of interaction design. She’s worked on a motion tracking performance environment with Robert Wechsler of Palindrome.de, and created multi-media, interactive performances with The Environments Laboratory at the Ohio State University. She loves being physically active whether it’s dancing, roller-skating, or taking her dog Bumba for a long walk.

Upcoming Appearances

October 1-3
Kendra Shimmell will be speaking on the Healthcare Systems panel at A Better World by Design at Brown & RISD in Providence, RI

October 26-29
Kendra Shimmell will be attending UX Intensive in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

November 8-10
Kendra Shimmell will be attending Mobile Health Summit in Washington, DC

Past Appearances

August 20
Kendra Shimmell attended Device Design Day in San Francisco, CA.

May 24-25
Kendra Shimmell attended Mobile Health 2010: Using Mobile Technology to Change Health Behavior at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.

March 6
Kendra Shimmell presented "Environments: The Future of Interaction Design" at Interaction'10 redUX in San Francisco, CA.