Meet Abs King: Director of Product Innovation at Zartico

Abs King invites everyone who works at Zartico or encounters one of our products to think differently. As Director of Product Innovation, she leads the team in connecting the dots between data, design, and experience.

Based in Salt Lake City, Abs brings to her role a Ph.D. in organizational communication and experience as a teacher and user experience (or UX) architect. Her LinkedIn profile includes this tagline that succinctly embodies her approach: “Innovation is a multi-player game. Let’s build something amazing!”

Keep reading to find out what inspires Abs to keep building new things.

How did your interests, education, and career path lead you to Zartico and the type of work that you do?

When I was in grad school, I had a research assistantship in the IT department at Purdue in the division of teaching and learning technologies. At the time, I was doing organizational research about the impact of a new product offering to better understand how technology changes the relationships between the university and students. This opened up a view to me of how there is a place for humanistic research alongside technical innovation. 

Later, as an Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at Texas Tech University, I was the director of the UX research lab, where we tested designs and made usability and accessibility recommendations. I had also been following along with the career experience of my friend Marieke, whom I’d known since undergrad. She’d been in UX consulting and then worked as a UX researcher. What was interesting to me is that she had a cognitive science research background but was also studying how people use technology in organizations. 

These experiences helped me to follow the connections between people’s embodied experiences and the technologies we are inventing. And, these experiences made me more interested in being part of the work to imagine and build the future. I had the chance to try that out first as an Experience Architect at Accenture and now at Zartico. 

If you weren’t doing this work, what do you think you would be doing instead?

If I wasn’t at Zartico I think I’d like to go back to school and study Montessori education. This educational approach is about how teachers create a framework for students, how they open up a location into which students can arrive to invent and create. 

I don’t know that I’d want to be a professional teacher, but I would like to understand more about how to shape opportunities for people to step into. This kind of invitational role is part of what I’m up to at Zartico by growing our interdisciplinary innovation practice, so I’m already starting to experiment with these approaches.

Where do you go to learn or to find inspiration? Are there any people, books, podcasts, activities, etc. that are capturing your attention lately?

To find inspiration, I go outside. It's not an original approach, but it is a very effective one for me. 

Since moving to Utah, I’ve been so amazed by the different kinds of geologies and ecologies that are just right here. When I’m outside I like to represent what I see with ink and watercolor in gestural sketches. Then I turn these sketches into paintings. I like the slower engagement with shapes and colors when I’m painting and have time to trace out connections between parts of the landscape. 

It's also a healthy balance for me to explore the organic, irregular shapes of nature — whereas in the technology design world, I am often layering boxes inside boxes. I haven’t shown my paintings in a long time, but I just submitted a few to a juried show, so maybe this year they’ll be out in the world!

Tell us about a place you love — what do you love about it, and what would you tell someone who is planning to visit for the first time?

I love to visit the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands. It’s a beautiful place and where I studied for my BA, so I have lots of good memories there. 

For someone planning to visit for the first time, I’d recommend checking out a concert at the Domtoren — it’s a 17th-century cathedral in the center of the city that has intense acoustics and contemporary stained glass windows. It’s certainly worth stopping at a cafe that is below street level on the side of the old canal in the city center. For an architectural history moment, check out the Rietveld Schröder House on the east side of town where modernist cube shapes pop out of a traditional brick neighborhood. 

What is your “bucket list” travel destination?

Iceland is at the very top of the list — I’m actually going there next week so, I’ll have more space on my bucket list soon. I’m excited to see volcanic rocks and erosion-worn hills. 

What do you love about working at Zartico?

My favorite part about the work culture at Zartico is the people. I work with extraordinarily smart people who are also humble about sharing their knowledge and open to new ideas. Zartico people have interesting and diverse backgrounds so there is always a chance for me to learn something new.

Hear from Abs about one of our recent product improvements, designed to make ZDOS® more accessible to all users.