Publicis Sapient names Leah Buley as Group VP, Experience Research Lead

 Publicis Sapient, the digital transformation hub of Publicis Groupe, has today announced the appointment of Leah Buley as Group Vice President, Experience Research Lead. She will be working directly with Chief Experience Officer and renowned tech & design leader John Maeda to deepen Publicis Sapient’s Digital Business Transformation practice capabilities. This announcement comes on the heels of three other appointments of women in leading roles at Publicis Sapient; Kristi Erickson as Chief Talent Officer, Wendy Johansson as GVP Experience Transformation Lead and Priya Bajoria as SVP Financial Services. 

Leah is a recognized thought leader in the experience design industry and a respected voice at the intersection of design and business. Her research has been published in HBR and Forbes, and her seminal text The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide is used as a staple on human-centered design. Commenting on Leah’s appointment, John Maeda, Global Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient commented: “Leah Buley’s seminal ‘The User Experience Team of One’ bookmarked a shift in the technology industry to combine designers’ intuition together with quantitative and qualitative research to more effectively solve users’ problems.” 

She was most recently at the digital product design platform company InVision. Throughout her career, she has also held design leadership roles at Adaptive Path, Intuit, BlackRock and Forrester Research. Prior to Publicis Sapient, Leah drove new research on the state of the design industry at one of the largest all-distributed technology startups InVision, where she launched The New Design Frontier. Before joining InVision she pioneered UX consultancy at Adaptive Path, where she later published what she learned there in her book, The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide. She then went on to become the design strategist at Intuit where she led strategic design initiatives to reimagine the future of payments, identified opportunities to hire high-performing designers and discover ways by which network effects could be realized in Intuit’s product ecosystem. She was also a principal analyst at Forrester Research and a UX Interface Designer at Barclays Global Investors that was acquired by BlackRock. Leah has a bachelor's from Barnard College and a master’s in library and information science from San Jose State University.