Tom Dayton is Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer (CXO) of Presto Innovation, LLC, a consulting services company based in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area.
Before deciding to found Presto Innovation, Tom worked at NASA Ames Research Center for 11 years, where he collaborated with, trained, and guided teams not only for the research center but also at Johnson Space Center (JSC) and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Tom helped project teams in all phases of their production lifecycles – customer engagement, cost estimation, concept development, requirements definition and analysis, interaction design, interface design, usability engineering, systems engineering, project management, verification and validation, and quality assurance – while customizing and applying User Experience and Agile methods suited for those teams.
Previously he was Senior Usability Engineer in iPlanet and in the Sun Microsystems Software Usability Lab. Earlier he was Technical Director of the Bellcore Rapid Applications Usability Engineering Group, where he was co-creator of The Bridge method (Dayton, McFarland, & Kramer, 1998) and co-author of the Design Guide for Multiplatform Graphical User Interfaces (McFarland & Dayton, 1995).
Before his post-doctoral fellowship at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center he got a PhD in Experimental Psychology with a blend of research methodology, decision making, cognitive science, quantitative methods (measurement, statistics…), and human-computer interaction. He has published journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers, and has taught participatory methods all around the world at conferences and as a consultant in companies.
In mid-2015, Tom co-founded Presto Innovation, LLC, with the goal of combining methods in User Experience, Product Development, and Agile to create custom solutions that would allow organizations to rapidly move their ideas forward from pre-concept through final production – transforming their “cool ideas” into real products and services.
Presto Innovation excels in providing hybrid consulting services, while continuing to help NASA and other agencies, as well as commercial companies in both public and private sectors, succeed with their mission-critical and revenue-generating endeavors.
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