Karen Holtzblatt is a thought leader, industry speaker, and author.  A recognized innovator in requirements and design, Karen has developed transformative design approaches throughout her career. She introduced Contextual Inquire and Contextual Design, the industry standard for understanding the customer and organizing that data to drive innovative product and service concepts. Her newest book Contextual Design 2nd Edition Design for Life is used by companies and universities worldwide.

Karen co-founded InContext Design in 1992 with Hugh Beyer to use Contextual Design techniques to coach product teams and deliver market data and design solutions to businesses across scores of industries in many countries. As CEO of InContext, Karen has worked with product, application, and design teams for over 30 years.

Karen is also the driving force behind the Women in Tech Retention Project housed at witops.org. WITops research explores why women in technology professions leave the field and creates tested interventions to help women thrive and succeed. Her new book with Nicola Marsden, Retaining Women in Tech: Shifting the Paradigm shares the work. Karen consults with companies to help them understand their diverse teams and improve retention, team cohesion, and equal participation by all.

As a member of ACM SIGCHI (The Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) Karen was awarded membership to the CHI Academy a gathering of significant contributors and received the first Lifetime Award for Practice for her impact on the field.

Karen has also been an Adjunct Research Scientist at the University of Maryland’s iSchool (College of Information Studies). Karen has worked with many universities to help design curriculum for training user experience professionals. Karen has more than 30 years of teaching experience professionally, at conferences and university settings. She holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto.