User experience, usability, and human-centered design.

Thomas Geis has served for more than 27 years in commercial projects for usability and user experience. In 1993 Thomas started as a usability tester for the test institute “TÜV Rheinland” evaluating safety-critical systems from a usability perspective ranging from medical devices to control rooms for nuclear power stations.

During his 10 years of usability testing, Thomas realized, that the same mistakes from a usability perspective are made again and again. Therefore Thomas started specializing in user requirements engineering for interactive systems based on real user data. In 2003 he founded his own consulting company in Cologne Germany “ProContext Consulting GmbH”. ProContext has been serving more than 150 clients ranging from business software to medical devices. In 2013 Thomas cofounded the “International Usability and User Experience Qualification Board” (UXQB) which lead to more than 5.500 certifications of professionals in the field of usability and user experience. Thomas has authored three books on usability engineering (all in German) and is editor of several ISO standards (ISO 9241-110 “Interaction principles”, ISO 9241-112 “Principles for presenting information”, ISO 25065 “User requirements specification” and ISO 25066 “Usability evaluation reports”). He is known for discovering innovations purely based on methodological approaches to analyzing real user data.

Thomas believes that it is important to apply methods in projects that every project member can learn and adopt, this is core to making an organization user centred.