Gina Bhawalkar is AVP of User Experience and Accessibility at Scottrade, Inc. in St. Louis MO, where she oversees a department tasked with designing great customer experiences for traders and investors.   At Scottrade she was hired to establish a User Experience practice within the firm and grow a UX team.  She has grown a team of one to a team of eight UX designers and UX researchers and has integrated user-centered design into the software development process.  In addition to overseeing the UX department Gina leads the firm’s journey mapping efforts and has been thrilled to see this technique embraced and leveraged as a tool to define product strategy from a client-centric standpoint.   Gina is also passionate about ensuring digital products are accessible to all users, regardless of ability, which has led her to oversee Scottrade’s accessibility efforts and educate associates throughout her company on the importance of inclusive design.

Prior to joining Scottrade, Gina was a UX consultant for four years at Perficient, Inc.   Prior to Perficient she worked in the accessibility industry first at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and then at Criterion 508 Solutions.  She has a MS in Human-Computer Interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology and undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Computer Science from Trinity University.  In her free time Gina is a lover of endurance sports and enjoys competing in marathons.