HFI Course Instructors

Dr. Eric Schaffer is the founder and CEO of Human Factors International, Inc. (HFI).

In the last quarter century, he has become known as the visionary who recognized that usability would be the driving force in the "Third Wave of the Information Age," following both hardware and software as the previous key differentiators. Like Gordon Moore's insight that processor power would double every 18 months, Dr. Schaffer foresaw that the most profound impact on corporate computing would be a positive online user experience – the ability for a user to get the job done efficiently, easily, and without frustration.

Dr. Schaffer's book Institutionalization of Usability: A Step-by-Step Guide provides a roadmap for companies to follow in order to make usability a systematic, routine practice throughout their organization.

Dr. Schaffer co-developed The HFI Framework™, an ISO-certifiable process for user-centered design, built on principles from human-computer interaction, ergonomics, psychology, computer science, and marketing.

Dr. Schaffer has completed projects for more than 100 Fortune 500 clients, providing user experience design consulting and training. He has extensive experience in the financial, insurance, manufacturing, government, healthcare, and telecommunications industries.

Recently he has been overseeing the development of UX Enterprise™, a relational database of UX objects. This is an enterprise software product that allows practitioners to design based on their organization's cloud of UX data. It is the full interlinked model of customer ecosystems, design projects, design specifications, standards, and methods. UX Enterprise will change the way user experience design work is done.

In addition, Dr. Schaffer has brought an array of certification programs to the user experience field, including the Certified Usability Analyst™ (CUA) and the advanced Certified User Experience Analyst™ (CXA) designations for UX practitioners, and the Certified Practice in Usability™ (CPU) and Certified Usable Design™ (CUD) programs for organizations.

Dr. Schaffer is a member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and a Certified Professional Ergonomist.