About Me

Noreen is a Brooklyn based researcher, information architect and teacher. She is COO of Decision Fish LLC and an Adjunct Lecturer at CUNY New York City College of Technology’s BFA program. She has facilitated workshops on mentoring, accessibility, search behavior and technology standards. Her recent research includes the effect of climate change on healthcare access by vulnerable populations, accessible science gateways and digital privacy and safety. 

She also is a research consultant at Internet Safety Labs (ISL) where she is working on digital safety research and design specifications. She serves on several standards working groups focusing on usability and accessibility at ISL, W3C, UXPA and Kantara Institute. She is co-founder of the Information Architecture Gateway, providing IA and SEO services to the science gateways community.

Full Biography

Noreen is a New York City-based information architect, user research consultant and startup advisor. She has worked with startups, government, education, finance, real estate, healthcare and local community organizations. Her company, Decision Fish, where she serves as Co-Founder and COO, was named a Best for NYC 2017 Changemaker by B Lab and the NYC Mayor’s Office of Workforce Empowerment and was a semi-finalist in MetLife Foundation’s Inclusion Plus 2018. She was a 2018 Startup Leadership Program Fellow and mentors at SLP, Technology Transfer Days, Impact Hub NYC  and the Columbia Venture Community.

Noreen served as the Director of Validation Research at Internet Safety Labs (formerly Me2B Alliance), from 2020-2022 where she developed research and guidelines for testing and measuring the behavior of connected technology, and advocates for respectful technology behavior. She has recently presented a statement on “Harmful UI Patterns” at California’s CPPA Stakeholder Meetings. She continues to be engaged at ISL as a consulting researcher.

She is developing mobile identity specifications with Kantara Initiative Resilient Identifiers for Underserved Populations (RIUP) WG , recently merging the Healthcare IT Assurance and Federated Identifiers for a Resilient Ecosystem (FIRE) WGs to focus on a health data use case for underserved populations. She developed UX guidelines and metrics for an earlier incarnation of the working group at Identity Ecosystem Steering Group, a body formed to address the 2011 National Strategy for Trusted Identity in Cyberspace.

Previously, she managed non-profit operations for the Information Architecture Institute and the OWASP Foundation, and has served on steering committees at local GIS and digital design organizations for many years. She is especially interested in accessible design, trusted identity, linked data, geospatial systems, and digital archives.

Noreen is a long-standing coordinating member of GISMO, a NYC-based chapter of the New York State Geographic Information Systems Association, and currently serves on its Board of Directors. In addition, she co-chairs the American Theatre Archive Project in New York and has served on the board of Virtuous Reality Interactive, Inc. (VRI), a not-for-profit digital design organization.

While serving on the board of VRI in the late 1990s, Noreen led Internet workshops for middle school students on the Pine Ridge Reservation and in Rapid City, South Dakota. This experience was valuable in her pursuit of online community development and engagement projects for the underserved. (NY Times article on VRI:  “Pro Bono Work Opens New Media to Neophytes.”)

She is an Adjunct Lecturer at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, where she teaches User Experience & User Interface Design, Web Design I and II, and Website Traffic and Analytics. She has taught UX intensives at General Assembly and the New York Code and Design Academy for corporate clients and individuals and facilities workshops for tech transfer and startup communities.

Noreen has a BA in Psychology from Columbia University and a MS-LIS from Pratt Institute’s School of Information, with concentrations in Digital Humanities and User Experience.