Ben Skelton
Director of Brand and Experience Ben Skelton is tasked with the execution and evolution of Habañero’s brand. He provides direction to various projects and programs that leverage the brand to drive awareness and engagement and help Habañero meet its organizational goals.
In addition to the stewardship of the Habañero brand, Ben provides user experience leadership for a number of website, intranet and web application design and development projects. He was the user experience lead for an intranet that was the recipient of the Platinum Award (first over-all) in the 2010 Intranet Innovation Awards and which was named one of the year’s ten best intranets in Nielsen Norman’s Intranet Design Annual 2011. Ben teaches a two-day seminar entitled “User Experience Done Right!” for industry professionals across Western Canada and is a co-founder of the Vancouver User Experience Group (VanUE).
Ben has been a member of Habañero’s team since 1999 and has held roles that include being the Practice Leader of Websites and eCommerce and the Director of User Experience. In April 2009, Ben became a partner along with four other long-term employees that have had a major impact on Habañero’s exceptional growth in the past six years. Ben holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from Simon Fraser University (SFU).
In his spare time, Ben is an avid air miles collector, travelling around the world sampling libations as he goes. He also enjoys watching bad movies.
Jasvir Shukla
Senior User Experience Consultant and Information Architect Jas Shukla works with clients to deliver intuitive and usable experiences for intranets, websites, and web applications. Jas leads the user experience vision, interaction design, and information architecture for a variety of projects. She works closely with clients, as well as user experience and engineering teams throughout the life of a project to deliver a solution that balances business, end-user, and technical needs. She leads user research activities, facilitates collaborative workshops, conducts usability testing, and communicates design through models, wireframes and prototypes. She also has experience with developing content strategies, planning for web analytics, and analyzing requirements.
Prior to joining Habañero, Jas worked at Microsoft as Program Manager on the SharePoint Portal Server team. During her three years at Microsoft, she managed development and test teams, developed functional specifications, and was responsible for feature sets in the SharePoint platform. Jas graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor in Systems Design Engineering, with options in Management Science and Cognitive Science. She enjoys running with her dog, maintaining her personal blog, and writing short stories in her free time.