About Austin Govella
Austin Govella has built products and services for some of the world’s largest organizations, including global industry leaders like ExxonMobil, Comcast, Verizon Wireless, Ashley Furniture, and The World Bank. His experience includes omnichannel marketing and commerce, employee experience, and product development.
Austin creates award-winning experiences that make work wonderful.
As an experienced facilitator with over 15 years of experience, Austin leverages a collaborative design approach with clients and specializes in facilitating design thinking, product management, design sprints, and Agile methodologies.
Stockphoto Austin posing with a swanky, Studio mug.
Writing and Speaking
Austin’s writing has appeared in ASIS&T’s Bulletin and Boxes and Arrows, and he has presented at SXSW Interactive, Agile, UXLx, Microsoft Collaboration Conference, Big Design, I.A. Summit, I.A. Conference, Intranet Week, and other conferences and local meetings for lean, agile, and design audiences in Houston, Austin, Dallas, Montreal, Baltimore, Boston, Memphis, Lisbon, New Orleans, Seattle, Nashville, Miami, Las Vegas, and Philadelphia.
Books
Austin wrote Collaborative Product Design (O’Reilly) and co-authored the second edition of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the web with Christina Wodtke for New Riders/Peachpit. His work appears in the third edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (the Polar Bear book) and The User Experience Team of One.
Editing
Austin provided technical edits for Nathan Curtis’s Modular Web Design, James Kalbach's Mapping Experiences, and Michal Levin's Designing Multi-device Experiences, as well as development editing for Thomas Wendt’s Persistent Fools. As an active member of the user experience community, Austin spent seven years as a development editor at Boxes and Arrows, one of the web’s leading design publications.
He is a former member of the Information Architecture Institute, and former organizer of Houston Experience Design, a local group for both the Information Architecture Institute and the Interaction Design Association.
Previous experience
Most recently at Avanade’s Digital Innovation Studio in Houston, Austin led cross-functional, agile teams to deliver service design and product development for Avanade’s clients alongside a plus one role as the Service Design Lead for North America.
Austin Govella has designed successful user experiences for the web and mobile since 1998. Prior to Avanade, Austin consulted independently in Houston for ChaiONE and LopezNegrete and worked at Convio to design the software that powers the country’s largest non-profits.
Product design with Comcast
Before Convio, Austin joined Comcast Interactive’s IA and Usability team as a project lead on Comcast Interactive’s two largest and most important products: Comcast.net and Fancast (now called xFinity). Comcast.net was a news and entertainment portal used by over 15 million unique visitors each month. Fancast, a next generation entertainment site, was featured at the Consumer Electronics Show (C.E.S.) in January 2008 and led all sites on the web in video engagement.
Consulting at the World Bank
Before joining Comcast, Austin lead projects for Satyam, one of Forrester’s top 50 global IT integrators. As a member of Satyam’s award-winning User Experience Management group, Austin improved user experience at the World Bank for enterprise search, mapping (GIS), mobile, intranets, extranets, knowledge management, and workplace collaboration.
Broad experience and expertise
Austin’s industry experience includes retail, ecommerce, financial services, energy, communications, education, non-profits, and entertainment. His broad expertise spans product design, client- and server-side development, information architecture, accessibility, interaction design, usability, and digital strategy.
Design Thinking
Austin has over 15-years experience facilitating design thinking workshops, bringing human-centered design into enterprise projects, and driving design thinking training and development. His book, Collaborative Product Design, applies design thinking principles and practices to help product teams collaborate and build better products.
Austin is a LUMA Institute Certified Facilitator of Human-Centered Design.
