Entrepreneur. Team Leader. Design Thinker.
Emphatic Researcher. Practical Visionary.

The vision to lead, the empathy to understand, and the experience to execute. As entrepreneur-in-residence and UX Design Director with Fortune 100 companies, Terri Ducay leads diverse teams of researchers, designers, and user experience architects on a strategic mission: build products and services on the horizon of what’s coming that change the way we think about the world, align with business objectives, and make the world a better place.

About Terri

A lifetime of exploration begins
I spent my childhood exploring the overgrown backyard gardens of my grandmother’s house, pretending I was a frontierswoman, forging new paths, and making tools out of sticks. There I learned the power of imagination to fuel creativity.

Later I would explore the factory floor at Bally Games, where my father (who rubbed shoulders with Raymond Loewy on their design of a jukebox) designed tools that helped assembly line workers perform their jobs more efficiently and safely. That’s how I learned iterative design, prototyping, and the power of empathy to inform user-centered research long before those terms came into vogue.

That pile of National Geographic's stacked in the family room no doubt inspired my love of travel, stories, and discoveries made working for companies around the world. My experiences have greatly influenced my compass showing the way to my next new adventure.

And that’s exactly what I am looking for today: a new adventure in the role of implementing Artificial Intelligence into product and service development.

Design Leader/Design Director: envision, create, produce…then look for the next challenge
Every product launch and every service rollout needs to be supported by a viable business design strategy. As a design leader, I define and drive the design process beginning with user-centered research and leverage those insights to support conceptual development and whiteboard incubation. Working with business leaders, I develop design-driven strategies and then move into agile design methodology: multi-disciplinary teams, rapid prototyping, and user testing in a feedback loop that enables a fail-fast/learn-fast approach to discovering successful solutions.

Research: ask the big “Why?”
As a design thinker and leader of client-side creative teams, I start with an empathetic approach to deep user-centered qualitative and quantitative research. Empathy leads to better questions, which means I drill down, investigate, and dig deeper to get to the heart of an issue. When no one else knows what they are doing, I’m in my comfort zone. The grounding of observational and ethnographic research as the foundation for design thinking is at the heart of every project I take on.

Team Building: together, we’re stronger
The secret of my team-building effort begins with finding the right people, with the right talent, who can contribute individual skills that make the team stronger as a whole. The DNA that builds strong teams is narrow for individuals, wide for the team, and broad for the company. Beyond the allocation of resources, level of effort, and budget, I make sure individuals are always challenged to help them grow, always learning, and always kept informed about what the company needs from them. My goal is to deliver a measurable return on investment that adds value to a company while ensuring delight from users and a sense of accomplishment by the team.

Mentoring: be the best you can be
Teams are only as good as the people within them. As a mentor, I coach people to look for more creative solutions and find unexpected answers. I instill confidence to explore while serving as an anchor for those creative explorations, making sure our design efforts are grounded in the practical considerations of an organization’s goals while giving individuals a sense of pride.