Dr. Shane McWhorter is an Interface Design Director: a specialist in helping a wide variety of disparate industries develop user interfaces, products and marketing materials that are compelling, easy to understand “out of the box” and efficient to use every day. Dr. Shane McWhorter enhances his client's design process throughout the complete design cycle with seventeen years of practical “hands-on” industry experience in advanced, Ph.D.-level product interface usability, human factors, design psychology and interface design standards.

A Product Interface Design Psychologist, Dr. McWhorter is a leader in the understanding of the way people process visual information and the way they learn and change from what they see. Dr. McWhorter applies this knowledge to product interface design, ensuring a compelling, pleasant, and easy product experience for the customer. Dr. McWhorter helps his clients develop competitive products and interfaces more quickly by applying to his client's creative process a deep understanding of human perception, behavior and learning, how people use and learn product interfaces, and how their use of products change as they use them.

Dr. McWhorter's approach to developing effective, usable, and competitive designs is a contribution to the design team, and from the start of the design process, of an understanding of how people visually understand designs. Having someone on your team that already knows how a person will perceive a design to guide the designer around usability problems will ensure your design objectives will be met quickly, minimizing expensive user testing. When user testing is warranted, Dr. McWhorter uses his deep knowledge of how we see and understand our visual world and his experience with artists, industrial and graphic designers to translate test results into real guidance.

As research faculty at Georgia Tech, Dr. McWhorter developed a computer simulation of how people process visual form, shape, color, texture, motion, and grouping. Through the integration of newly discovered perceptual and visual learning research results by top perceptual psychologists and through validation by research studies on user's visual capabilities, the model predicts changing human visual capabilities across a wide variety of complex situations. The model was rated as “best in the world” by the United Kingdom's Defence Electronics Research Agency and is in use by Industry and the Departments of Defense in several countries.

While at Georgia Tech, he taught visual human factors modeling to government and industry through Georgia Tech's Continuing Education program, and taught Engineering Design and Modeling for six years.

Dr. McWhorter left a faculty position at Georgia Tech to apply his expertise to the product design business. He held positions as Chief Human Factors Engineer at a large software company, Usability Director at a consumer electronics company and User Interface Director at a healthcare information technology company. Currently, Dr. McWhorter consults to design firms working in Healthcare Information Technology and Electronic Health Records (HIT, EPM, EHR, EMR), Defense, Consumer Electronics, Interactive Television and Broadband Media, 3D (Stereoscopic) Television, Web, Software, Industrial Control (SCADA HMI) and Advertising industries as an Interface Design Director and Usability Analyst. He also is an interactive media consultant to market research firms and teaches Interface Design as university adjunct faculty.

Dr. McWhorter earned his Ph.D. in Visual Human Factors from Georgia Tech in 1993, a Master's Degree in Engineering Computer Graphics from Georgia Tech in 1991, Bachelor's Degrees in Applied Psychology in 1991 and Physics in 1988. He also holds certificates in Technical and Business Communication, Neural Networks, and Infrared/Visible Signature Suppression (classified).

Dr. McWhorter is a member of the American Psychological Association, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and the Usability Professionals' Association.