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.
Christopher Roosen
I am a Principal UX, Usability Consultant and Axure trainer with 10 years experience in exploring complex UX problems, engaging users, developing strategy and designing multi-channel solutions.
I specialise in mobile, apps and transactional systems. I focus on delivering measurable and radical improvements to usability, user experience and engagement by:
- Focusing on both needs and delights
- Simplifying complex business processes and technology
- Identifying influential (and often latent) requirements
- Prototyping Axure based interactive wireframes early
- Testing with end users often
- Delivering concepts via an Agile UX framework
I have consulted with some of the largest and most innovative companies in Oceania, including Westpac, Optus, Telstra and News Digital Media. Recent projects include:
- UX design for www.therocks.com.au - Created a modern and engaging experience for a frontline Sydney cultural icon.
- UX design for a complex business portal - A year-long project to create a usable and high performance transactional system.
- Founding member and Principal UX Designer for Demibooks Inc (www.demibooks.com), creators of the world’s first iPad-based tool for creating interactive books.
I am the Founder of Cognitive Ink, which offers cutting edge UX consulting and business analysis support as well as hands on Axure training at all levels. Cognitive Ink is also one of the few Axure Approved trainers has delivered Axure courses in Australia and New Zealand for four years across hundreds of training sessions.
A creative technologist with a keen sense for design solutions that deliver on strategic objectives, David has close to two decades experience designing and producing digital products and services. Over the years, David has accumulated a strong track record of highly successful and innovative applications for some of the world’s most respected organizations. Clients have included Volkswagen, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Renault, Schweppes, Disney, Warner Music, Denny’s, HCA, Southwest Airlines, Verizon and Alcatel-Lucent. You can read more of David's thoughts on the Pull Media blog.
Samantha Starmer
Over the last 12 years, Samantha Starmer has worked on a wide variety of experience and information architecture projects and strategy. She started her career in the early days of Amazon.com, enjoying a year long stint in Slough to launch Amazon.co.uk, and later developed experiences for Amazon’s checkout functionality and the third party selling platform. She also honed her start-up skills at SchemaLogic, and her business strategy skills while at Microsoft. She is currently a senior manager at REI, leading teams for experience and, interaction design, information architecture, and customer experience research and analytics. Samantha’s most recent focus has been evangelizing and creating holistic customer experiences across channels, time, and devices. She regularly teaches at the University of Washington’s Information School, where she received a Masters of Library and Information Science degree in 2005. Samantha is active in the UX community and enjoys mentoring new UX practitioners and learning from as many different disciplines as possible. She has served on the boards of the Information Architecture Institute and Content Management Professionals, and is currently on the Oversight Committee for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Samantha is creating a new blog, but in the meantime, you can follow her on Twitter at .
John Ferrara
John Ferrara has worked in in user experience design since 1999, designing interfaces for websites, desktop applications, and video games. Since 2006 he's been with Vanguard, and before that did significant work for Unisys and General Electric. He's been a forceful advocate for closer connections between UX and game design at the IA Summit, EuroIA, and Games for Health. He’s the author of the new book Playful Design: Creating Game Experiences in Everyday Interfaces, published by Rosenfeld Media. His nutrition education game Fitter Critters was a top prizewinner in the Apps For Healthy Kids contest, sponsored by Michelle Obama's Let's Move! campaign. Before entering the professional world, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in communications. Feel free to follow John on Twitter at @PlayfulDesign.
Steve Workman
Steve Workman is a consultant for PA Consulting Group in London. His job is to design and create applications and web sites using the latest standards-compliant and accessible technology. Steve is the lead mobile developer within PA, making Android and iPhone apps for the enterprise. He is also an organiser of the London Web Standards group who set up educational talks on web standards for people in the London area. Follow him on Twitter @steveworkman or read his personal blog on steveworkman.com
Marek Pawlowski
Marek Pawlowski is the founder of MEX (https://pmn.co.uk/mex/). Since 1995, he has focused the MEX business on helping digital industries to develop better, more profitable products through improved understanding of user behaviour with mobile devices and wireless networks. MEX is best known for its events, research and consulting, which balance commercial, technical and user insights to define the future of mobile user experience. The next MEX event, ‘6 Pathways to the mobile UX horizon’, is in London on 30 November - 01 December 2010.
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.
Beth Koloski is a Lead Experience Architect at EffectiveUI. She has more than 12 years of experience designing user interfaces for Web-based software, leading successful projects for clients such as Orbitz, Domino’s, Red Bull and Standard & Poor’s.
Prior to joining EffectiveUI, Beth held senior interaction design roles at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, texturemedia and Foci. Beth was the Experience Design Director for the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Colorado Chapter Board of Directors from 2005-2006, and served as the editorial assistant for O’Reilly’s book titled, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites.
Additionally, Beth is a contributor to UX Magazine and speaks at industry events such as IA Summit.
Beth received her Bachelor of Arts in English from St. Mary's College of California and her Master of Arts in English Literature from New York University.
James Glasnapp
With expertise in domestic and international work in ethnography, evaluation, planning, behavioral theory, modeling, requirement analysis, competency transfer, advertising, and public health, James Glasnapp manages PARC's Workscapes and Organization team. He is currently interested in how ethnographic observations of information flow in hospital and clinic settings during transitions to EMRs can facilitate improvements in work practice and streamline processes. James has conducted ethnographic research in eight countries on a multi-national global account sales team to inform the development of PARC technologies that improve the way distributed teams will work in the future. Interested in technological innovation with respect to human interaction, James co-developed a model for human-display interaction with PARC computer scientists based on ethnographic observations. He motivates clients to look beyond the obvious and imagine future possibilities, and is inspired by opportunities to use ethnographic data to achieve process and/or technological innovation. Dr. Glasnapp received his doctorate and masters degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also an award-winning educator. James is an avid competitive swimmer and hiker.
PARC
A premier center for commercial innovation, PARC, a Xerox company, is in the business of breakthroughs. We work closely with global enterprises, entrepreneurs, government agencies and partners, and other clients to invent, co-develop, and bring to market game-changing innovations by combining imagination, investigation, and return on investment for our clients. For 40 years, we have lived at the leading edge of innovation, merging inquiry and strategy to pioneer technological change. PARC was incorporated in 2002 as a wholly owned independent subsidiary of Xerox Corporation—enabling us to continue pioneering technological change but across a broader set of industries and clients today.
Sylvia Veitia
Vice President Membership Experience at AAA.
Alexander Negash
Alexander Negash is currently a User Experience and Digital Marketing Analytics Consultant. He provides consulting services to help clients identify user behaviors, understand their needs and attitudes with the goal to enhance the user experience and optimize business. He has many years of experience practicing varied roles within the user experience, analytics, and marketing disciplines. His main research interest is in identifying strategic and business impacts of emerging digital technologies on user behavior and the use of new and innovative ways of applying these technologies in the process of research, design and development of products and services to enhance the user experience. He’s also passionate about data and how insights from different sources are used to back user experience design and development decisions. Alexander holds MSC in Information Systems and MA in Information Science.
Max Steenbergen
Max Steenbergen is the resident UI & graphic designer for a Dutch company developing yacht-monitoring software. After graduating professional photography, he stumbled into the UI/UX field which turned out to be the thing he wanted to do all along. Being completely self-taught in the ways of user experience, interfaces and graphics, he's about to follow a 3-year course called Communication & Multimedia Design to gain more knowledge on the subject. He blogs about UI's and UX at https://face-value.tumblr.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/maxsteenbergen
Eric Fisher
Eric Fisher is a product designer and social design evangelist at Facebook. With a background in layout and architecture, he's obsessed with creating things that conceptually make sense. Eric previously worked on the search design team at Google and the evangelism team at Apple, where he contributed to the Human Interface Guidelines and devised design concepts for building iPhone applications. In conjunction with his work at Facebook, he independently advises a cluster of smaller startups in the Bay area on product strategy and user experience design. Eric holds a bachelors of engineering in Digital Media Design from the University of Pennsylvania where he explored web development, human-computer interaction and minored in psychology. He writes about design at FishoftheBay.com and maintains the daily wordplay game OneUpMe.com, a personal project, on the side. Follow Eric on Twitter: @fishofthebay
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.
Daniel Burka
Daniel Burka is a web designer living in San Francisco. Currently, he's the director of design with a startup called Tiny Speck and for several years he was the creative director at Digg. He grew up in PEI, Canada, where he was one of the founders of silverorange. Aside from obsessing about interface design and CSS selectors, he's a frequently-falling rock climber, a lazy cyclist, and an often out-of-bounds disc golfer.
David Gillis
David Gillis is an Interaction Designer at Teehan+Lax, a Toronto-based
company that helps clients define and design great user experiences in
the digital channel. There, he's done award-winning information
architecture and design work for clients like AOL, AIR MILES, John
Hancock and Virgin Mobile. David's passion for interaction design has been informed by a wide
range of interests and experiences, both academic and professional. In
school, he took a multi-disciplinary approach, combining studies in
communication, cognitive science and systems design. He holds Bachelor
Degrees in Math and English, and a Masters Degree in Information
Systems and Knowledge Media Design. Areas of ongoing interest and investigation for David are
evidence-based design (how can designers strike a better balance
between intuition and formal inquiry), participatory design (how can
designers better engage their clients and end-users in collaborative
processes), and holistic design (how can we better design experiences
that span across multiple modes, touch points and platforms). David is a regular contributor on the Teehan+Lax blog and you can follow him on Twitter @davegillis.
Cynthia Gage Kellam
Cynythia is Vice President, Digital Experience Design & New Media at TIAA-CREF. Cynthia is a seasoned digital strategist and user experience expert with a proven track record of building and leading passionate and successful teams. With over a decade of experience creating user-centered digital solutions, Cynthia has executed designs to address objectives ranging from a robust reliability-tracking interface for operations professionals to a rheumatoid arthritis drug’s brand website requiring accessibility for patients with mobility constraints. Since joining TIAA-CREF in Jan. 2006, Cynthia has positioned TIAA-CREF.org for recognition including Dalbar's citation for "most improved" industry web site (post public site redesign, Nov. 2006) and The Customer Respect Group's designation of TIAA-CREF.org as an "Accessibility Benchmark" site (Feb. 2008). Currently, Cynthia directs a team with expertise spanning content strategy, information architecture, visual design, social media and human factors. She instills a belief that a company's digital experience defines its brand online and is dedicated to providing exceptional online experiences; driving a forward-looking user-centric approach to strategy and design, and allegiance to tested best practices in execution. Prior to TIAA-CREF, Cynthia was at Medco Health Solutions where her work on the redesign of www.medcohealth.com and ongoing user experience design leadership was praised by the industry with multiple eHealthcare Leadership awards including "Best Site Design" and "Best Overall Internet Site" from 2002-2004, and the "best interactive site for Seniors" in the Spring 2004 by the World Wide Web Mature Media Awards. Cynthia served as the experience strategy and design lead for EXPERxT Advisor®, a consultative, web-based tool that empowers clients and account teams to use claims data to monitor "real-time" plan performance, identify financial and clinical opportunities, and develop business solutions that align with specific needs. Cynthia received a B.A. in anthropology from Haverford College and continued on to graduate studies at Columbia University; she considers user experience design a form of applied anthropology requiring deep understanding and observation of the end user.
Christine B. Whittemore is Chief Simplifier of Simple Marketing Now LLC, a marketing communications consultancy that helps organizations better connect with customers through social media and content marketing.
Formerly Director of In-Store Innovation for Solutia’s Wear-Dated carpet fiber, Christine has been active in the social media space since June 2006 when she launched her marketing blog, Flooring The Consumer, about the customer retail experience, marketing to women and social media marketing. It is ranked in the AdAge Marketing Power 150 Blogs and listed on AllTop.
She also writes the Simple Marketing Now Blog, a Junta42 Top 42 Content Marketing Blog and an eCairn Top 150 Social Media Marketing Blog, about marketing with social media and content.
Since 2006, Whittemore has embraced the yearly Bathroom Blogfest, when bloggers from around the globe come together to write about the importance of bathrooms in the customer experience. As chief organization & inspiration officer for the event, she ensures that the event encompasses perspectives ranging from sociology, marketing, research, psychology, environmental, customer experience, and user experience design.
Whittemore is a columnist for Floor Covering Weekly where she writes about the customer retail experience. She contributes to MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute and is a frequent speaker on the topic of customer experience and marketing with social media.
Christine serves on the Columbia Business School’s Alumni Club of New York Board of Directors and is a member of the Surfaces Education Advisory Council. She earned her undergraduate degree from Smith College and her MBA from Columbia University.
Hunter Whitney
Hunter Whitney is a consultant, author, and instructor who brings a distinct UX design perspective to data visualization. He has advised corporations, start-ups, government agencies, and NGOs to achieve their goals through a thoughtful, strategic design approach to digital products and services. Hunter is the author of "Data Insights: New Ways to Visualize and Make Sense of Data”. He was also asked to contribute a chapter in the book, “Designing for Emerging Technologies: UX for Genomics, Robotics, and the Internet of Things”. Additionally, Hunter has written numerous articles covering a range of subjects for various online and print publications including UX Magazine.
Juan Sanchez
Senior Editor, UX Magazine Juan Sanchez is an experience architect at Denver-based EffectiveUI, a leading provider of rich Internet applications. With a background primarily in print design, branding, and advertising, Juan’s skills have evolved toward web technologies including HTML, CSS, Adobe Flash and Flex. Juan earned his BA in Communication Design from California State University, Chico. Equipped with a creative eye and logical mind, Juan walks the line between designer and developer, with particular interests in user experience, usability, designer/developer collaboration and open-source projects.
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.
Alexander Dawson
Alexander Dawson is an award winning, self-taught, freelance web professional, writer, published author, and recreational software developer from Brighton (UK). With more than 10 years of industry experience he spends his days running his consultancy firm, HiTechy, on Twitter @AlexDawsonUK, writing professionally about web design, and giving his free time to assist others in the field. In recent years, Alexander has become an established web writer providing articles for some of the industry’s most respected sites including Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions, and SitePoint (where he also assists other web designers regularly through their popular forums). In addition, as a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers he actively promotes and advocates the benefits of a good user-experience and web standards. When Alexander isn’t coding or writing about design and development, he enjoys a game of tennis (or chess) and watching movies.
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.
Dmitry Dragilev
Dmitry is the Marketing Lead at ZURB. He snuck over to Zurb from Crossloop (a start-up down the street). He's a classic example of a software engineer turned to the dark side. Originally from Moscow, Russia, he immigrated to New Hampshire when he was 11. At 16 he got his first software development gig and for the next eight years he worked as software engineer for a number of companies. He received his bachelors in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire in 2004. After that he was a developer by day and a marketer for a small start-up by night, when he found that he loved the "night work" better than his "day work." Leaving behind his comfortable day job, family and friends he decided to move across the country to Silicon Valley to work as a marketer for a start-up in the valley. Over the next two years, Dmitry helped Crossloop with their marketing while also getting his MBA from the Fisher Graduate School of International Business. He feels like he's on top of the world to be starting at ZURB. In his spare time he plays classical guitar but has been getting heavy into the blues lately. He ran the Big Sur Marathon last April and hasn't turned down a good run since then. He hikes, bikes, and has some crazy moves on the dance floor. You can follow Dmitry on Twitter @dragilev.
Jeremy Britton
Jeremy Britton is Partner at ZURB, a 12-year old design consultancy with 100 start-ups under its belt. He acts as Design Lead and Strategist with the team. Setting up problems that people care about and then solving them in ways that work for businesses and delight customers are his focus at ZURB. He still loves to draw pictures, which comes in very handy at these tasks. A San Francisco Bay Area native, he graduated from the hilltop forest known as UC Santa Cruz (Banana Slugs!) with a degree in Fine Art and an emphasis on digital media and electronics. His background in theatrical set design led him to create some pretty far out art installations during this period and his stint as a graduate teaching assistant gave him his jump into the web industry. "Getting a bunch of students to take their crazy ideas and actually turn them into something with Flash or on the web was extremely cool," he said. Before joining ZURB, Jeremy worked as an independent design consultant, then animator and interactive designer for Walmart.com, and later co-founded his own digital media company NING Empire, though not the Ning that closed $44 million in financing last year. You can follow Jeremy on Twitter @jebritton.
Bryan Rieger
Bryan (@bryanrieger) is a designer, writer and reluctant developer with a background in theatre design and classical animation. Bryan has worked across various media including print, broadcast, web and mobile, and with clients such as Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and the Symbian Foundation. Most days, Bryan can be found designing and prototyping a diverse range of experiences, and every once in a while, he can also be found organising a Mobile Design UK event in London.
Stephanie Rieger
Stephanie (@stephanierieger) is a designer and closet anthropologist with a passion for the many ways people interact with technology. With a diverse background, Stephanie's expertise lies in marrying design, technology and business goals to craft simple, elegant experiences. A compulsive researcher, Stephanie is always keen to discover and share insights on the mobile web and mobility trends in emerging economies.
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.
Stephen P. Anderson
Stephen P. Anderson is a speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He spends unhealthy amounts of time thinking about design, psychology and leading intrapreneurial teams—topics he frequently speaks about at national and international events. Stephen recently published the Mental Notes card deck, a tool to help businesses use psychology to design better experiences. He’s also writing a book on "Seductive Interactions" that will explore this topic of psychology and design in more detail. Prior to venturing out on his own, Stephen spent more than a decade building and leading teams of information architects, interaction designers and UI developers. He’s designed Web applications for businesses such as Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy as well as a number of smaller technology startups. Stephen likes to believe that someday he’ll have the time to start blogging again at PoetPainter.com
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.
Giles Colborne
Giles has been working in usability and user-centred design since 1991. He formed cxpartners with Richard Caddick in 2004 focusing on creating outstanding user experiences and measurable changes to projects and products. Giles is a former President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association and now sits on their Global Advisory Committee and international Conference Committee. He has worked with British Standards Institute in developing guidance on web accessibility. Giles is a highly-rated speaker at events around the world, and has also published the book Simple and Usable (Peachpit Press, 2010). Follow him on Twitter @gilescolborne.
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.
Amy Cueva
Amy Cueva is Founder, Chief Experience Officer, and healthcare principal at Mad*Pow. She partners with clients like New England Journal of Medicine, Google, Aetna, Fidelity, and Monster to create strong multi-channel experience strategies, intuitive digital experiences, and streamlined processes. She built Mad*Pow's user-centered design methodology as the vehicle to synergize business goals, customer needs, and technology requirements. She formed the Healthcare UX group on LinkedIn bringing together those invested in the design of healthcare experiences to discuss best practices, trends, challenges, and the creation of standards. She presented at last year’s HIMSS virtual conference and the 5th Annual World Healthcare Innovation & Technology Congress (WHIT5.0), and will be presenting at the 2010 IA Summit and the UPA International Conference. She is the secretary and one of the charter members of the NH UPA and was selected as one of Mass High Tech's Women to Watch in 2009.
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.
Suzanne Ginsburg is a user experience consultant based in San Francisco, California, and the author of Designing the iPhone User Experience. She works with many different kinds of organizations, from established technology companies to small iPhone start-ups. Suzanne also maintains a UX blog, Touchy Talk, where she provides advice on touchscreen app design. If you’d like to stay in touch with Suzanne, follow her on Twitter @suzanneginsburg.
Devin Coldewey
Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based freelance writer and photographer. He primarily writes for CrunchGear and TechCrunch. Devin's personal website is coldewey.cc.
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.
Gregory P. Care
Gregory P. Care is an attorney at the law firm Brown, Goldstein & Levy, LLP in Baltimore, Maryland where his practice includes disability rights. Brown, Goldstein & Levy was one of several firms that represented the plaintiffs in the National Federation of the Blind v. Target Corp. class action lawsuit that resulted in a settlement to make Target.com accessible.
Elaine Wherry
Elaine Wherry is Co-founder and VP of Products at Meebo and oversees Meebo's Web, User Experience, and Product Management teams. She takes a special interest in finding passionate folks who want to build amazing products that people closer together across the Web: https://.meebo.com/jobs/openings/. You can find her personal blog at https://.ewherry.com/.
Suzanne Ginsburg is a user experience consultant based in San Francisco, California, and the author of Designing the iPhone User Experience. She works with many different kinds of organizations, from established technology companies to small iPhone start-ups. Suzanne also maintains a UX blog, Touchy Talk, where she provides advice on touchscreen app design. If you’d like to stay in touch with Suzanne, follow her on Twitter @suzanneginsburg.
Stephanie Weaver
Stephanie Weaver is the principal of Experienceology, a visitor experience consultancy based in San Diego, CA. Weaver has a B.A. in film and design and an M.P.H. in health education. Weaver developed her problem-solving approach during twenty years of working in the healthcare and museum fields. Her real-world experience comes from institutions considered best-in-class: Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago Children’s Museum, Chicago Botanic Garden, and the World-Famous San Diego Zoo. Long known for her ability to distill and synthesize key information, she is also a highly rated workshop presenter and meeting facilitator. She has created memorable experiences on a tour bus in China, out of a backpack near a garden lagoon, with an ice sculptor and a Snow Fairy on an Enchanted Winter Wednesday, and while making a section of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Her how-to handbook, Creating Great Visitor Experiences: A Guide for Museums, Parks, Zoos, Gardens, and Libraries, is in its 4th printing and is a best-seller for Left Coast Press. Clients include the San Diego Natural History Museum, California State Parks, Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum, Quail Botanical Gardens, Mission San Juan Capistrano, Cabrillo National Monument, the St. Louis Arch, Oakland Museum of California, and the Philbrook Museum of Art. Visit her blog, podcast, and website, or follow her on Creating Great Visitor Experiences: A Guide for Museums, Parks, Zoos, Gardens, and Libraries. She works with nonprofit cultural attractions on experience reviews and staff training. Visit her blog, podcast, and website, or follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
Samantha Starmer
Over the last 12 years, Samantha Starmer has worked on a wide variety of experience and information architecture projects and strategy. She started her career in the early days of Amazon.com, enjoying a year long stint in Slough to launch Amazon.co.uk, and later developed experiences for Amazon’s checkout functionality and the third party selling platform. She also honed her start-up skills at SchemaLogic, and her business strategy skills while at Microsoft. She is currently a senior manager at REI, leading teams for experience and, interaction design, information architecture, and customer experience research and analytics. Samantha’s most recent focus has been evangelizing and creating holistic customer experiences across channels, time, and devices. She regularly teaches at the University of Washington’s Information School, where she received a Masters of Library and Information Science degree in 2005. Samantha is active in the UX community and enjoys mentoring new UX practitioners and learning from as many different disciplines as possible. She has served on the boards of the Information Architecture Institute and Content Management Professionals, and is currently on the Oversight Committee for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Samantha is creating a new blog, but in the meantime, you can follow her on Twitter at .
Brynn Evans
Brynn (@brynn) is obsessed with the intersection of social networks and human behavior. At first she shunned social psychology, finding real joys in neuroscience and dissecting brains. But after a 6-year stint as a neuropsychologist, she switched to understanding how people act and behave (with each other!) in the real world. And when Digg and Facebook and Twitter entered the scene, her work dovetailed again into social interaction design. Today she's the Social Interaction Lead and UX Researcher at Bolt | Peters. In her free time, Brynn enjoys drawing comics and overbooking herself with community events. She runs the Overlap SF meetups and gives out mini-grants to awesome local projects with the Awesome Foundation in SF. She's a judge and advisor to the betacup design competition, which deals with the growing problem of drinking (too much) coffee out of non-recyclable paper cups. Brynn gives talks and workshops on social search, and if you get her talking, she won't shut up about her love for Japanese green tea.
Juliette Melton is a design researcher based at IDEO in San Francisco. Her work has spanned a broad range of practices including education leadership, public health research, and digital publishing.
Juliette holds an MEd from the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
When she's not focusing on design research you'll often find her doing portrait photography or chopping vegetables.
John Ferrara
John Ferrara has worked in in user experience design since 1999, designing interfaces for websites, desktop applications, and video games. Since 2006 he's been with Vanguard, and before that did significant work for Unisys and General Electric. He's been a forceful advocate for closer connections between UX and game design at the IA Summit, EuroIA, and Games for Health. He’s the author of the new book Playful Design: Creating Game Experiences in Everyday Interfaces, published by Rosenfeld Media. His nutrition education game Fitter Critters was a top prizewinner in the Apps For Healthy Kids contest, sponsored by Michelle Obama's Let's Move! campaign. Before entering the professional world, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in communications. Feel free to follow John on Twitter at @PlayfulDesign.
Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D.
Susan Weinschenk first used a computer in the mid-1970’s, in graduate school. "I wrote and ran my first computer program, and the printer spit out a piece of paper that said 'JOB ABORTED.' Rather than being discouraged I was fascinated! What would happen when 'normal people,' not computer scientists, interacted with these things called computers?" She thus started a 30-year career in applying psychology to the design of technology. Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology and is the author of How to Get People To Do Stuff, 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People, and Neuro Web Design: What makes them click. She is a presenter, speaker, and consulting, writes a popular popular blog at her website, and also writes the Brain Wise blog at Psychology Today.
Whitney Hess
Whitney Hess is a user experience design consultant based in New York City. She helps make stuff easy and pleasurable to use. Prior to going independent, Whitney was on the design team at Liquidnet, an international financial software company that runs the leading electronic marketplace for wholesale stock-trading. Previously, she was an interaction designer at two marketing agencies, Digitas, and Tribal DDB, where her clients included American Express, The New York Times, Allstate, Claritin, Tropicana, and EarthLink. Most notably, she helped to conceive, design, and test an innovative card search tool for American Express, and is named as a co-inventor on its U.S. patent. Whitney is a strategic partner with Happy Cog and user experience consultant for Boxee, among other startups and major corporations. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing and a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. She writes about improving the human experience on her blog, Pleasure and Pain and can be reached via Twitter @whitneyhess.
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.
Francisco Inchauste
Contributing Editor, UX Magazine Francisco Inchauste is a designer and a writer. He works as a UX Design Specialist for Universal Mind. He has spent the past decade working with large and small companies on websites and RIAs to create memorable brand-driven experiences. He enjoys contributing to the design community by writing for publications like Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions, and Drawar. He shares his passion for design on his industry recognized personal blog. You can connect with him on Twitter.
David Gillis
David Gillis is an Interaction Designer at Teehan+Lax, a Toronto-based
company that helps clients define and design great user experiences in
the digital channel. There, he's done award-winning information
architecture and design work for clients like AOL, AIR MILES, John
Hancock and Virgin Mobile. David's passion for interaction design has been informed by a wide
range of interests and experiences, both academic and professional. In
school, he took a multi-disciplinary approach, combining studies in
communication, cognitive science and systems design. He holds Bachelor
Degrees in Math and English, and a Masters Degree in Information
Systems and Knowledge Media Design. Areas of ongoing interest and investigation for David are
evidence-based design (how can designers strike a better balance
between intuition and formal inquiry), participatory design (how can
designers better engage their clients and end-users in collaborative
processes), and holistic design (how can we better design experiences
that span across multiple modes, touch points and platforms). David is a regular contributor on the Teehan+Lax blog and you can follow him on Twitter @davegillis.
Moira Dorsey
Moira Dorsey is Vice President and Research Director at Forrester Research, where she serves Customer Experience professionals. She leads a research team that covers topics ranging from voice of the customer programs to modeling the return on investment from customer experience projects. Moira's personal coverage areas include the future of online customer experiences, persona development, multichannel experiences, and user experience reviews.
Forrester Research
Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 19 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 26 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit forrester.com.
Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D.
Susan Weinschenk first used a computer in the mid-1970’s, in graduate school. "I wrote and ran my first computer program, and the printer spit out a piece of paper that said 'JOB ABORTED.' Rather than being discouraged I was fascinated! What would happen when 'normal people,' not computer scientists, interacted with these things called computers?" She thus started a 30-year career in applying psychology to the design of technology. Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology and is the author of How to Get People To Do Stuff, 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People, and Neuro Web Design: What makes them click. She is a presenter, speaker, and consulting, writes a popular popular blog at her website, and also writes the Brain Wise blog at Psychology Today.
Dana has helped hundreds of people make better design decisions by giving them the skills to gain knowledge about users. She's the co-author, with Jeff Rubin, of Handbook of Usability Testing Second Edition. (Wiley, 2008) Visit Dana's website at usabilityworks.net or follow her on Twitter @danachis.