I lead Accenture Studio for Experience Design. With a diverse background and passion for the many ways people interact with technology, my expertise lies in creating intuitive and desirable experiences that utilize deep insight into user behavior and psychology.
Say hi on Twitter @sachendra
Jon Kolko
Jon Kolko is Vice President of Consumer Design at Blackboard; he joined Blackboard with the acquisition of MyEdu, a startup focused on helping students succeed in college and get jobs. Jon is also the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design. His work focuses on bringing the power of design to social enterprises, with an emphasis on entrepreneurship. He has worked extensively with both startups and Fortune 500 companies, and he's most interested in humanizing educational technology. Jon has previously held positions of Executive Director of Design Strategy at Thinktiv, a venture accelerator in Austin, Texas, and both Principal Designer and Associate Creative Director at frog design, a global innovation firm. He has been a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was instrumental in building both the Interaction and Industrial Design undergraduate and graduate programs. Jon has also held the role of Director for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM. He is regularly asked to participate in high-profile conferences and judged design events, including the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the Center for Design Studies of Monterrey, in Mexico, and Malmö University, in Sweden. Jon is the author of three books: Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann, Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, published by Oxford University Press, and Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, published by Austin Center for Design. His fourth book, Well Designed: How to use Empathy to Create Products People Love will be published by Harvard Business Review Press in November, 2014.
Zachary Lym
Zachary Lym was a freelance usability engineer who is attempting to apply usability engineering to political policy. He maintains an adjunct researcher position at Cognitive Policy Works and is double majoring in psychology and Informatics at the University of Washington
Ilana Westerman has for the past 15 years focused on helping bring people and technology together through seamless digital experiences. At Create with Context, Ilana leads strategic research and idea generation for global Fortune 500 companies.
Ilana also shares her passion for research-driven design as a part-time faculty member at San José State University, where she has taught graduate level courses in the Industrial Systems Engineering/HFES program since 2005.
Previously, Ilana performed strategic user research at Adobe, helping envision and define future products focused on digital youth and creativity.
Prior to that, Ilana joined Yahoo! in its infancy and helped build the User Experience Research team, managing Community, Cross-platform, Mobile, and Living Room experience teams. Her group defined the strategic direction of Yahoo! with projects including Future of the Internet (3, 5, 10 years out), Platform Convergence, Internet Everywhere, What Can Be with Yahoo! Mobile, and Global Yahoo! Platform.
Paul Bryan is a User Experience Consultant at Retail UX in Atlanta, GA. A UX Strategist and Researcher, Bryan started designing e-commerce Web sites in 1995, in Barcelona. Since founding Retail UX in 2002, Paul’s consulting clients have included some of the most successful corporations in the world—The Home Depot, Coca-Cola, SAP, Delta Air Lines, Philips, Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Cox, and GE. He manages the UX Strategy and Planning group on LinkedIn. Paul writes short, punchy findings from his work on Twitter @paulbryan.
Nicholas Gould
Nick Gould is CEO of Catalyst Group (www.catalystnyc.com), a leading Usability and User Experience Design firm based in New York. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Prior to Catalyst, Nick held a variety of leadership positions focusing on Internet product development and strategic partnerships and joint ventures. Nickwas VP of Internet Strategy and Business Development for Scholastic Inc., the global children's publishing and media company. Prior to that, Nick led Business Development efforts for BOL.com, Bertelsmann's International online bookselling venture, and Citigroup. Nick's Internet career began at Prodigy Internet where he directed the development of several high-level cross-content initiatives including Prodigy's 150+ online communities and the Prodigy Internet IE 4.0 Active Channel. Nick also provided strategic business affairs and business development support to Prodigy's content departments.
Chuck Longanecker
Chuck Longanecker is the founder of the user experience design company digital-telepathy. DT has ambitious goal of improving the design of the web by introducing new design standards to be adapted by fellow web designers, entrepreneurs and large organizations. Current products include SlideDeck and Hello Bar. Chuck actively consults and collaborates with Tim Ferriss, Eric Ries of The Lean Startup, Gary Vaynerchuk and more. Check out Impress, digital-telepathy's landing page and banner ad design service.
UX Magazine Staff
UX Magazine was created to be a central, one-stop resource for everything related to user experience. Our primary goal is to provide a steady stream of current, informative, and credible information about UX and related fields to enhance the professional and creative lives of UX practitioners and those exploring the field. Our content is driven and created by an impressive roster of experienced professionals who work in all areas of UX and cover the field from diverse angles and perspectives.
UX Magazine Staff
UX Magazine was created to be a central, one-stop resource for everything related to user experience. Our primary goal is to provide a steady stream of current, informative, and credible information about UX and related fields to enhance the professional and creative lives of UX practitioners and those exploring the field. Our content is driven and created by an impressive roster of experienced professionals who work in all areas of UX and cover the field from diverse angles and perspectives.
Greg Nudelman
Greg Nudelman is a UX Designer, Strategist, Speaker, and Author. For over 20 years, he has been helping his Fortune 100 clients like Cisco, IBM, and Intuit to create loyal customers and generate $100s of millions in additional valuation. A veteran of 35 AI projects, Greg is currently a Distinguished Designer at Sumo Logic, creating innovative AI/ML solutions for Security, Network, and Cloud Monitoring. Greg presented 120+ keynotes and workshops in 18 countries and authored 5 UX books and 24 patents. His latest book, “UX for AI,” is shipping May 13, 2025. More info at: https://UXforAI.com.
John Yunker (@johnyunker) is a leading expert on web and content globalization and author of the book The Art of the Global Gateway: Strategies for Successful Multilingual Navigation. He writes the popular blog Global by Design and is co-founder of Byte Level Research.
Called an interface guru by publications like Wired and Fast Company, Aza is the co-founder of Massive Health, and was until recently Creative Lead for Firefox. Previously, he was a founding member of Mozilla Labs. Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally. Aza has founded and sold two companies, including Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays in its first week. He also creates modular cardboard furniture called Bloxes. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with honors in math and physics.
Richard Gunther is a technologist who's been making the case for user-centric design for over two decades—even back as a programmer on text-based mainframe systems. Now a senior member of Universal Mind's Delivery practice, Richard runs a number of UX projects, bringing his passion for great customer experiences to desktop, web, and mobile platforms.
When Richard's not escaping to Disney World or Iceland, he's often writing about home media and home automation for the Digital Media Zone, where he also co-hosts a podcast covering Microsoft home entertainment technology and news. Richard applauds the world around him at @WhatImpressesMe on Twitter, and he occasionally rants about random topics on his personal blog at richard.is.
Erietta is a human centred designer and design manager from Sydney, Australia. Starting out as a graphic designer, Erietta fell in love with the web industry after she discovered communities willing to help her debug her CSS. Wisely noting her efforts were best spent avoiding code but still enamoured by the web, Erietta worked alongside developers designing and helping to implement large scale CMS then ventured into research and strategic design. She has worked across manufacturing, finance, media, retail, and telco to design websites, applications, products and service experiences. Erietta blogs about design and related meet-ups at https://.eriontheinterweb.com and tweets @erietta
Different
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Joshua Allen
Joshua Allen is an Open Web Evangelist for Microsoft, where he was a founding member of the team that runs the MIX Conference for designers and developers and the MIX Online community of articles and open source goodies for designers and developers. Since creating his first Web startup in 1994, he has worked on advancing the Open Web, including the last 12 years at Microsoft. He is an avid reader and tinkerer, and is especially fascinated by psychology, behavioral economics, and anthropology. When he's not reading a new book or research report, he may well be conducting a surreptitious experiment on bystanders to test some new thesis about human behavior. His experiments with rock climbing, ice skating, or parkour sometimes lead to painful injuries, but he heals quickly.
Tony Walt is the design and technical director of Rich Media at EffectiveUI, where he oversees interface development and rich media integration. Tony believes in creating unique, immersive, user-friendly experiences and thrives on pushing the bounds of user interaction models while creating unexpected experiences. Tony has worked on a variety of projects, including for the following clients: Wells Fargo, Qwest, Microsoft, The Discovery Channel, Audi, The Learning Channel, Adobe, Oakley and T-Mobile. Previously, Tony founded and ran Fusion Media Interactive (FMI), a production agency specializing in 3D, interaction and motion design, that was integrated within Effective UI in 2007. A graduate of the Art Institute of Colorado, Tony’s experience includes 3D, video, motion and digital design, and interface development.
Brennan Browne
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Andy Williams
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Pek Pongpaet
Pek Pongpaet is the VP of Technology and Product for SpotOn Inc., and the award winning creator of ShelfLuv.com and BizTome iPad app. Pongpaet’s expertise ranges from product design and development, and martial arts. Prior to SpotOn, Pongpaet worked at Accenture Technology Labs in the research department coming up with next generation user interfaces. At Roundarch, a technology and strategy consulting firm, Pongpaet’s work included envisioning and designing the dashboard of the future for the Tesla Model S electric car.
Tammy Guy
Tammy Guy is the founder of a visual design and usability consulting firm focused on strategic brand planning, creative direction and diffusion of user experience problems by applying design theory and usability best practices in a rapidly changing Web environment. Her firm provides consulting services (e-commerce solutions, mobile apps and tablet experience) to clients from various industries such as fashion retail, commodity retail, pharmaceutical, insurance, financial services, social networking and others. Services include product evaluation, strategy and planning, creative development and direction and usability consulting. With more then 16 years of experience, Tammy previously worked as the Creative Director at LivePerson, Inc. and was a Design Group Manager at the Hertz Corporation where she art-directed all aspects of graphical application development for all customer facing websites. In addition, Tammy has been a frequent guest speaker with the Nielsen Norman Group for the past few years, teaching visual design and usability workshops. She also teaches similar design and usability courses with General Assembly in New York City.
Jeremy Canfield
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Laura Hampton
Zabisco are digital user experience agency who produce engaging designs and content for websites and mobile. They work with clients of all sizes and sectors on strategy, production and sustainable online marketing. Zabisco has built up a positive reputation within the industry and with clients alike, centring all work on an understanding of the end user. Led by managing director Hammad Khan, who has worked extensively in user experience and continues to provide consultation in the area, Zabisco’s ability to combine functionality and usability with design and engagement has led them to work with an impressive client portfolio, including Barclays, the British Heart Foundation, Toshiba and the IET. Zabisco’s core services are User Experience, Content Engagement, Websites & Mobile and Digital Marketing, based around a team of information architects, copywriters, designers, marketers and developers. Laura Hampton works within Content Engagement and Digital Marketing; a role which is varied but always centred on engaging the end user through content, from text to video and infographics, and through the use of social media and search to build up real brand affiliations. Laura’s articles on UX Magazine draw on her knowledge and that of her colleagues to cover a range of topics within UX. For more articles and blog posts from Zabisco, visit their blog at www.zabisco.com/blog or follow them on Twitter @Zabisco.
Jon is based in Sydney, Australia where he currently works as a UX Consultant for Stamford Interactive. His previous work includes research for Canon and British Telecom where he developed concepts for future uses of technology and research into technology trends.
Scott McDonald is co-founder and managing director of Modus Associates, a digital innovation and design consultancy based in New York City. A frequent industry speaker and writer, he has advised global brands including Morgan Stanley & Co., Sony, Citibank and SIRIUS Satellite Radio, among others.
Joseph Labrecque is primarily employed by the University of Denver as Senior Interactive Software Engineer specializing in the Adobe Flash Platform, where he produces innovative academic toolsets for both traditional desktop environments and emerging mobile spaces. Alongside this principal role, he often serves as adjunct faculty, communicating upon a variety of Flash Platform solutions and general web design and development subjects. In addition to his accomplishments in higher education, Joseph is the Proprietor of Fractured Vision Media, LLC a digital media production company, technical consultancy, and distribution vehicle for his creative works. He is founder and sole abiding member of the dark ambient recording project “An Early Morning Letter, Displaced” whose releases have received international award nominations and underground acclaim. Joseph has contributed to a number of respected community publications as an article writer and video tutorialist and is author of the Flash Development for Android Cookbook, Packt Publishing (2011), What’s New in Adobe AIR 3, O’Reilly Media (2011), What’s New in Flash Player 11, O’Reilly Media (2011), Adobe Edge Quickstart Guide, Packt Publishing (2012), Learning Adobe Edge, Packt Publishing (2012), and serves as author on a number of video training publications through Video2Brain, Adobe Press, and Peachpit Press. He regularly speaks at user group meetings and industry conferences such as Adobe MAX, FITC, D2W, 360|Flex, and a variety of other educational and technical conferences. In 2010, he received an Adobe Impact award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the education community. He has served as an Adobe Education Leader since 2008 and is also an Adobe Community Professional. Visit him on the web at https://josephlabrecque.com.
John Anderson
John Anderson (@Jrileyd) is a User Experience Designer and Certified Usability Analyst at Asynchrony Solutions, Inc., a leader in Agile software development. He collaborates with a variety of teams in the industries of healthcare, real estate, and government focused on crafting custom mobile and web applications. For more information, visit https://blog.asolutions.com.
Cyd Harrell is UX Evangelist at Code for America, where she gets to spend all day helping create better experiences for citizens. She encourages like-minded UXers to apply for the 2014 CfA Fellowship. Before its acquisition in June 2012, she was VP of UX Research at Bolt Peters in San Francisco.
Taylor Bastien is a Senior Systems Analyst at 4Point in Ottawa, Canada where he spends much of his time designing custom desktop and mobile Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) using Flex, Java and HTML/Javascript.
Drawn from an early age by the allure of software development's creative possibilities, Taylor took a slight detour from that career path out of high school, earning a B.A. in French Studies and becoming involved in theatre. After creating his first web page in 1994, he rediscovered his passion for designing software, went on to earn a B.Sc. in Computer Science and has worked as a developer in some capacity ever since. Given his somewhat eclectic background (and some would say personality), Taylor espouses a multidisciplinary approach to custom software design, being convinced that by harnessing bold imagination, sound technical skill and old-fashioned common sense, modern day developers are on the threshold of a new creative Renaissance.
Taylor has lived in Belgium, Germany and three Canadian provinces, speaks English and French fluently and has (sadly) become quite rusty at German and Dutch.
Always eager to discuss innovative ways of creating software, when he has time, Taylor jots down many of his musings on his blogs at https://blogs.4point.com/taylor.bastien and https://.RIAGrande.com On twitter, he’s @riagrande.
Don Bruns
Don Bruns is a managing director in the User Experience practice at NavigationArts, a Washington, DC based digital consultancy. Bruns has seventeen years of experience in delivering web-based solutions with a focus on information architecture, rapid prototyping, and user research. As a veteran of Razorfish and Aquilent, Bruns has led client engagements for such high profile clients as KPMG, Bank of NY Mellon, AARP, U.S. Department of State, and USA.gov, the official web portal of the United States federal government. He has been a featured speaker at KMWorld and Gilbane conferences. You can find him at donbruns.net.
Alex Schleifer
Alex is CEO of Sideshow , an award winning creative agency. You can read his blog here.
Constantinos Demetriadis is a full time freelancer working from his personal digital design studio "Lovely Productions", basd in Athens, Greece.
In 1998 he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Industrial Design, but at the same time he got acquainted to the internet, which ultimately won his heart.
His professional career started when, in 1999, he started working for HellasNet as a Web Designer, and in a very short period he obtained the position of Art Director for FUTURENEED, a business unit of the same company. Since then he has been actively involved in numerous award winning projects, with the highlight in 2002 when he won the Ermis Gold and Grand Ermis for the site of Naftemporiki. Other awarded projects include the personal site of Demis Nikolaides (2003), FORTHnet’s portal site (2004) and the Ermis Awards site (2005).
His client roster includes BP, Coca-Cola, Lenovo, DHL, Interamerican, Naftemporiki and OTENET among others.
On a personal level, he has been involved in the creation and development of ProjectNeo, a Greek design community which launched in November 2000. In 2003 it was awarded an Ermis Gold in the Amateur / Non Commercial Sites category. ProjectNeo ended its journey in November 2005, when it reached a full 5 years in operation.
Back in 2004, Cahlan Sharp was planning on being a dentist. After working as an editor for online high school courses, however, he became fascinated with web technology. A year and a half later, he had taught himself the basics of web markup, Flash, PHP, and was working as a multimedia developer for a global non-profit organization. Cahlan has been building internet experiences since then, and is currently an entrepreneur and web engineer. He has taught various university classes and corporate workshops on web technologies.
Cahlan began a consulting company that placed fourth among student-run business in the state of Utah. He received his Master's degree in Instructional Psychology from Brigham Young University in 2010, and continues to build businesses as well as web products.
In late 2011, Cahlan joined Undrip, a social media technology company.
Cahlan is a married father of three and speaks Portuguese, Spanish and English.
Christian Saylor
Christian Saylor is a Senior UX Design Specialist at Universal Mind. He specializes in bridging the gap between functionality and aesthetics, delivering beautiful, effective digital experiences to his work for clients. With 15 years of experience in the interactive design community, he sees the user experience as the touchstone of interaction—the connection point through which a message is heard, a purchase is made, or a thought inspired. His goal is to engage users on a personal level independent of medium, using design to meet them where they are and in ways they’re comfortable with, whether that’s via a mobile or embedded device, a car, a website, or even a well-designed t-shirt. In order to disconnect with all digital aspects of life Christian loves opening up a good book, spending time with his family and on occasion giving back to the design community by teaching at Kendall College of Art and Design.
Mark Baskinger is an associate professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University who teaches courses in industrial design with an emphasis on form & interaction. His interests include exploring new paradigms for interactive objects and interpretive environments, and methodologies of design drawing and visual thinking to promote collaboration. He has published papers and articles on the language of designed artifacts, inclusive/universal design, visual “noise” in product design, tangible interaction, and methodologies of visualization.
Baskinger currently serves as a researcher with the Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center through Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh; he is a core faculty member in the Master of Tangible Interaction Design program through Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture (mTID), is an affiliate faculty member of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon and collaborates with the /d.search-labs at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands (TU/e).
An international speaker and workshop leader, Mark also conducts Drawing Ideas®: A Field Guide to Visual Thinking courses in conference and business contexts where he makes design drawing methods and visual thinking techniques accessible to a broader audience and demonstrates strategies for using sketching to foster collaboration in design processes. His work has been featured in design publications and international magazines, and has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), I-Space Gallery (Chicago), the Krannert Museum (Illinois) and the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery (Pittsburgh). His work is also included in the permanent art collection of the University of Illinois.
He has won numerous design awards from ID Magazine and the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDEA) and personally holds multiple product patents. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Baskinger was creative director at Corchia Woliner Rhoda in New York City, and was the lead designer at the Central Park Zoo - Exhibits and Graphic Arts Dept. He also held a visiting faculty position in the School of Art and Design (https://art.uiuc.edu) at the University of Illinois (UIUC). Parallel to his appointment at Carnegie Mellon, he co-directs The Letter Thirteen Design Agency, and is a founding member of the EcoDesigners Guild of Pittsburgh.
Tim Todish has been working in the Web/RIA industry for more than 10 years. After cutting his teeth on HTML, ASP and SQL, he shifted his focus from back-end technologies to developing rich front-end experiences with early builds of Flex and AIR. Tim has a passion for using technology to create engaging user experiences across multiple devices.
From his years working closely with creatives and designers for companies including Meijer, Inc and Crowe, Tim has developed the unique ability to view both the technical and creative sides of any challenge. This has also honed his talent for bringing “techies” and “non-techies” together, fostering cross-cultural communication between the two.
Tim is currently working as a UX Designer for Maestro.
Theresa Neil
Theresa Neil is an independent interface designer based in Austin, Texas. She has led the design for more than 80 live web, desktop and mobile applications since 2001. Recent clients include PayPal, Pearson, UnboundID and a number of start-ups. Her portfolio and blog are at www.theresaneil.com. Theresa and Bill Scott co-authored "Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions" published by O’Reilly Media in January of 2009. More about the book including the Flickr photo stream and blog are at www.designingwebinterfaces.com.
Corrina Liao Ph.D.
Corrina Liao had extensive product design experience prior to moving to Sydney, Australia – as part of the User Experience Design Team at Dell, Inc (Singapore) and prior to that, Business Imaging Division, Hewlett Packard (Singapore). As a Dell Senior Usability Category manager, Corrina successfully managed the usability portfolio of inkjet printers and Display (TVs, flat panel monitors & projectors) line of business during her tenure at Dell. At Hewlett Packard, Corrina played a pivotal role in setting up and mentoring a group of human factors professionals. In Sydney, as a Senior Usability Engineer at Silverbrook Research Pty Ltd, she managed the user experience of the wireless interactive digital pen. Recent career expansion was to join Different and venture into the world of service design research. As part of the UX team at Different, Corrina innovated and delivered experience architectural deliverables such as research findings, persona and user scenarios, interaction specifications, design requirements and customer journeys across various service sectors and industries. Currently, Corrina is working at Telstra as an UX Product Specialist. She can be contacted at [email protected]. https://au.linkedin.com/in/corrinaliao
Different
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A Customer Experience Designer, passionate about participatory design, design strategy and ethnography with experience in finance, government, telecommunication, media and professional services.
Current obsessions include escape rooms, non-mouse interactions and quilt making.
Jordan's been a freelance experience strategist for the past 5 years, working with organizations across North America. He's in the process of establishing Hostile Sheep, a boutique experience lab created to help organizations produce better digital products and services. He's worked with brands like Coke, Nike, BMW, Canadian Olympic Committee, HP, GE, Ford, Canadian Tire, Kraft, Telus, P&G and Diageo. He's worked with agencies like Critical Mass, Razorfish, W+K, TAXI, Trapeze, Ogilvy One, Proximity/BBDO, Cheil, JWT, and others. Follow Jordan on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Paul Noble-Campbell
Paul Noble-Campbell is Director of Design and Strategy at M3 Design. He creates opportunities through design strategy that make organizations, people and society thrive. By combining his human-centric approach with his diverse experiences, Paul creates rich brand experiences, design strategies and future visions. His collaborative leadership has guided multi-national clients through hundreds of initiatives resulting in the design of products, digital interfaces, web experiences, brand identities, interactive exhibits, interiors, packaging and environmental graphics. Twitter: @pauljnc
Rachel Hinman
Rachel Hinman is a researcher, designer and a recognized thought leader in the mobile user experience field. Her passion for art, design and cultural study coupled with the belief that people can use technology to improve the human condition have been the driving forces in her career for over a decade. Currently, Rachel is a Senior Research Scientist at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California. There she focuses on the research and design of emergent and experimental mobile interfaces and mobile experiences for emerging markets. Prior to joining Nokia, Rachel was and experience design director at Adaptive Path, and a mobile researcher and strategist for Yahoo's mobile group. Rachel's innate sensitivity to people and culture have proven powerful skills in the field, enabling her to successfully lead research studies on mobile phone usage in the US, Europe, Asia and Africa. Rachel writes and speaks frequently on the topic of mobile research and design. She is the creative force behind the 90 Mobiles in 90 Days Project and her perspectives on mobile user experience have been featured in Interactions Magazine, BusinessWeek and Wired. Currently, Rachel is writing The Mobile Frontier: A Guide for Designing Mobile User Experiences with Rosenfeld Media. Expected publication is winter of 2011. Rachel holds a Masters Degree in Design from the Institute of Design in Chicago.
Cynthia Thomas
Cynthia Thomas is partner at Translator, a digital experience agency focused on connecting online and offline, customer and brand, and person-to-person through smartly designed experiences. She leads strategy, conceptual incubation and user experience thinking for agency clients, helping them navigate the digital landscape. Cynthia’s passion for the UX discipline and experience thinking as a whole has driven her focus on studying the social, cultural and behavioral influence of the digital space on human interactions and expectations. A digital native, Cynthia started out in her career both as a web designer and a developer writing code. This hands-on experience gradually led to an interest in strategy and user experience design, which she parlayed into a job within the interactive group at Laughlin/Constable, one of Milwaukee's largest ad agencies. It was there she introduced research, strategy and the UX discipline to LC’s process. In 2005 she joined Fullhouse as an Interactive Strategist, refocusing and establishing the UX discipline and parlaying it into a service offering for the agency. During this time, she also introduced experience design (XD) as both a team structure and philosophical approach to solutioning, helped implement a collaborative work environment. She speaks and writes on the subject of user experience and experience design on a regular basis, and is a frequent contributor to the Translator blog Just Sayin’.
Cathleen Zapata
Cathleen Zapata is currently the Vice President of Research and Customer Experience at Metrics Marketing Group, an analytics-driven database and interactive marketing firm in Cleveland. She is also the President of the Northeast Ohio chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association, one of the most trusted organizations in the field of usability with over 2500 members worldwide. Cathy has over 15 years experience in quantitative and qualitative research, specializing in usability. Her background includes a wealth of experience in usability testing, eye tracking, heuristic evaluations, user research and conversion enhancement strategies. She is the architect and manager of MetricsLabSM, a groundbreaking research facility in Cleveland, Ohio, making Metrics Marketing the only interactive marketing firm with a full solution of both owned in-lab and mobile eye tracking across the entire Midwest. Cathy has been featured in MarketingSherpa, About.com, Crain's Cleveland Business and The Columbus Dispatch, and regularly teaches on topics of usability and conversion strategies at colleges, conferences and events internationally, including Shop.org, BAI Retail Delivery, UPA, and more. She has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies to improve their user experiences including American Greetings, Sherwin-Williams, Coach, Inc., Midas, Speedway, KeyBank, Citizens Bank, The Cleveland Clinic, Medical Mutual of Ohio, Nationwide Insurance, and more.
Jonathan Anderson | UX Magazine
I am a tech-focused jack of all trades and the editor-in-chief of UX Magazine. I'm also the author of Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software, published by O'Reilly Media. Through its partnership with UX Magazine, I am also a senior advisor to Didus, a recruiting and career development company focused on user-centered professionals. As well, I'm engaged as the Managing Director, Product Strategy & Design for Dapperly, a fashion-oriented software product startup, and am the Principal of First Day, a small private equity and consulting company. From 2005 to 2009, I helped found EffectiveUI, a leading UX strategy, design, and development agency focused on web, desktop, and mobile systems.
I’ve been fortunate to participate in work that’s on the leading edge of user-centered strategy and design, customer experience, and software development. Everything is converging around an increased attention to the quality of user experiences, around web-enabled or web-like software, and around technologies that can create unified experiences across multiple platforms, devices, and applications. I’ve built on my experience at UX Magazine, EffectiveUI, and in writing my book to undertake a major project to find ways to make dramatic improvements to the user-centered field and to increase the perception of user-centered design, research, and technology as being core strategic values.
My work can be very hard to explain because what I do day-to-day is extremely varied since my role is usually to be a jack-of-all-trades. If I’m performing any one job function this week or month, it’s always in the broader context of fulfilling the needs of that business (whatever they might be) and in the even broader context of the private equity holding and management activities of First Day.
My primary value has been to be an adaptable, fearless, fast-learning manager of and versatile resource to a large number of small businesses, where I hold the line in diverse functions while the companies are too small to hire specialized professionals for any given part of their business. This means I’ve had my hands in almost every aspect of starting, growing, and managing a small business, including finance, accounting, legal, management, HR, marketing/brand, PR, IT, resource management, facilities, general operations, corporate governance, project management, product development, change management, and many others.
Alex Rainert
Alex has been working in the interactive industry for 12 years. He's spent that time working on a variety of platforms on the interactive agency side and as the co-founder of a startup, dodgeball.com (acquired by Google in 2005). Since then, he's managed the UX and Creative teams at Schematic NY and is currently working with a local startup on an early 2010 launch. Over the years, he's done work for clients including Verizon Wireless, Nokia, HBO, IBM, CBS, Core Performance, Freshdirect and Thomson Reuters. He blogs about innovation in design at everydayux.com, his sub-140 character thoughts can be found at @arainert and he consults on mobile, social and emerging technologies at Tinker Studio.
Alex Schleifer
Alex is CEO of Sideshow , an award winning creative agency. You can read his blog here.
I'm a father, husband and a sometimes night-owl with a deep affection for salads, water and cherry Nibs. An IxDA mentor and former UX’er at nForm, Critical Mass and Habanero Consulting Group, I can now be found at Central 1 Credit Union where I'm a Senior Product Manager, Direct Banking and overseeing a wide range of online, web and phone banking products used by 300+ Canadian credit unions and a number of banks.
Hana Schank
Hana Schank has been in Information Architecture for 14 years. She began her career at Andersen Consulting where she designed an award-winning interactive training program, and went on to work on designing the first website for CBS News. As the first hands-on Information Architect at OgilvyInteractive, Hana helped to establish a detailed documentation methodology and information architecture process which led to successful engagements for several clients who were designing and building sites for the first time. In her role as Director of Information Architecture at Zentropy Partners, she developed an IA process for the global organization, as well as leading the information architecture development for a range of high profile clients. Hana founded Collective User Experience in 2003, and now oversees all IA and UX work in addition to working directly with a range of clients to help make their web sites and applications more usable. Hana and several of the team members from CollectiveUX blog about IA in the real world at beautifulbutdumb.blogspot.com. She has finally broken down and started tweeting @hanaschank. Hana lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Megan Grocki
Megan bakes the best brownies on the planet. The end. Actually, that's just the beginning. Sassy, smiling and straightforward, Megan’s a senior member of Mad*Pow’s experience design team. With over 15 years of experience in research and experience design, Megan specializes in helping clients discover the attitudes, intents and behaviors of their users and understand what is truly important to them. By being the ultimate user advocate, she is able to improve the organization and presentation of content and refine the messaging in a way that rings true with the audience(s) and meets business goals. She has worked with clients including Bank of America, Aetna, Constant Contact and McKesson to sharpen their understanding of their audiences and design new digital experiences steeped in rigorous research and design thinking. She has been able to flex her marketing strategy muscles, creating new brand identities and developing clear and meaningful strategies for evolving brands. Until recently, Megan was also the mastermind behind Mad*Pow’s marketing strategy. From evaluating market conditions to directing digital marketing and social media strategies, Megan guided the marketing direction for all our events and promotional activities while collaborating with sales to support them in generating maximum buzz. Now that she has passed the Marketing torch, she is happy to wear just one hat as Experience Design Director. Prior to Mad*Pow, Megan served as marketing manager with Momenta as well as senior product manager and user interface manager at Bottomline Technologies. Megan holds a BA from the University of New Hampshire and is always seeking to continue her education by attending conferences, seminars and reading her weight in UX books. She is a founding member of the NHUPA. Her speaking gigs have included Refresh Boston, the 2010 IA Summit in Phoenix, the 2010 Usability Professionals' Association International conference in Munich, 2010 UPA Boston and Interaction11 in Boulder. In addition she served as IxDA’s Interaction12 conference program director. A die-hard tennis fan, Megan enjoys traveling the world, splashing in the waves at her favorite local beach and coffee shop-hopping around town with her husband and two young children. Megan is on Twitter at @megangrocki.
Dan Florio
Dan Florio was an average designer who learned enough about writing code to become average at it as well. But he liked coding more than designing. Besides, it makes a great deal more money. Plus, all clients think they can design and create good UX. But none of them think they can write code. Back in 2008 he quit working for Microsoft XBox and became a freelance developer. It seemed that Flex was in high demand so he set out to teach himself to become a Flex/Actionscript developer. He needed a good project to work on that would push his skills to improve so he turned to an old idea he had about making a website that would help people know the best times to run and pee during a movie. He built it. Named it RunPee and then watched it spend a year being lonely and getting no visitors. Then someone in the media - Leo Laporte - learned about it. And others learned about it from him and so on and so on. Eventually Dan was doing radio interviews for stations as far away as South Africa. RunPee was surprisingly a success. Dan now lives in the South Bay area of Los Angeles where he is working hard - hardly working - to create another successful project. Most aren't but it's fun trying. You can read Dan's developer blog at polyGeek.com.