Who is behind MindCanvas?
Uzanto
MindCanvas has been created by Uzanto Consulting - a customer research and product strategy company based in Mountain View, California, USA, and New Delhi, India.
We believe that online research can benefit from the same type of innovation and creativity brought to other domains using a Rich Internet Application (or AJAXian) approach. Why use HTML dropdowns and checkboxes in the age of Flickr & Google Maps? Why base your product design on bored respondents robotically filling out HTML surveys when you can enthrall them with Game-like Elicitation Methods to give you superior feedback ? We wanted to reinvent online research. MindCanvas is the result of that effort.
For more information, go to www.uzanto.com.
The Uzanto Team
The team that runs MindCanvas has world-class expertise in doing user research for technology products.
Rashmi Sinha is the dreamer in chief. She dreamt up MindCanvas, and insisted, among other things, that the site design must include the picture of a brain! She is appalled at how primitive the online tools for user research are, and thinks that games are the best inspiration for reinventing online research. Once she gets an idea into her head…
Rashmi has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. Prior to Uzanto, she taught at SIMS, UC Berkeley. She is Program Chair for BayCHI, and has served on the committees for several HCI conferences including CHI 2005, and IA Summit 2003 & 2004. If you must know more, read her blog for her thoughts on user experience, tagging and categorization etc. Her email is .
Jonathan Boutelle likes playing with technology. He conceptualized MindCanvas as a rich internet application - using a mix of Flash, vanilla HTML, and Ajax. If you must know the gory history - MindCanvas started life as an Ajax application, the participant experience was soon ported to Flash. Jon studied computers at Brown University, and has been a software engineer for computer graphics companies and business software companies. You can read Jon’s thoughts about AJAX, RIA, Web 2.0, and related topics at jonathanboutelle.com. His email address is .
Amit Ranjan made MindCanvas happen. He made sure that the software could be used by the masses (ask him about the cafe testing done by the Uzanto team). He also figured out how the research service should work, and be effective in the business setting. His background in market research and business helped keep our software focused on real business problems (the rest of us have an unfortunate tendency to geek out over the technology and research methods).
In a previous life, Amit worked for Pepsico in India (he is still recovering from that!) and for Asian Paints & Godrej prior to that. Amit has an engineering degree from REC/NIT and an MBA from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University. You can learn more about Amit at amitranjan.com. His email address is .
Random Tidbits
Wow, you read till the end of the page! If you are still curious, here are some tidbits...
The name MindCanvas is to denote that we focus on the mind to harvest design insights which can form the canvas for product design! It took us almost as long to decide on that name, as to build MindCanvas.
The visual design for this website was done by StudioSt, based in Uruguay (we highly recommend them). Ask us about the three way Skype calls (India, US, Uruguay) sometime.
If you have feedback, feel free to mail any of us (email addresses are above). Or if you prefer a generic email address try mindcanvas at uzanto dot com.
Have questions? Call 1-650-564-0000 or email support@themindcanvas.com for answers, to find out about purchasing MindCanvas or to get access to live demo!
