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.
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.
Nate Bolt
Nate (@boltron) is fascinated by the personal, social, and cultural role of technology, and how research and design can transform those roles. After pioneering and directing the User Experience department at Clear Ink in 1999, which included the construction of Natural Environment and Remote Observation laboratories, Nate co-founded Bolt | Peters. He now serves as el presidente, where he has overseen hundreds of user research studies for Sony, Oracle, HP, Greenpeace, Electronic Arts, and others. Beginning in 2003, he led the creation of the first moderated remote user research software, Ethnio, which is being used around the world to recruit hundreds of thousands of live participants for research. Nate regularly gives presentations on native environment research methods in both commercial and academic settings, and is the co-author of Remote Research, a book on remote testing. Working with faculty at the University of California, San Diego, he created a degree titled "Digital Technology and Society," which focused on the social impact of technology. He also completed a year of communications studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was jailed briefly for playing drums in public without a license.
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.
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.
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.
Victoria Bellotti
Victoria Bellotti manages Palo Alto Research Center's (PARC's) Socio-Technical and Interaction Research team at PARC where she also developed PARC's Opportunity Discovery research targeting methods and program. Victoria studies people to understand their practices, problems, and requirements for future technology, and also designs and analyzes human-centered systems—focusing on user experience. Best known for her research on personal information management and task management, Victoria has more recently been focusing on user-centered design of context- and activity-aware computing systems. Her previous work at London University UK, The British Government's Department of Trade and Industry, EuroPARC, and Apple encompasses domains such as transportation, process control, computer-mediated communication, collaboration, and ubiquitous computing. Dr. Bellotti received her Ph.D. in Human Computer Interaction from Queen Mary and Westfield College, an M.S. in Ergonomics and a B.S. in Psychology from University College, both in London . She is a co-inventor on 7 patents and 13 patent applications and an author or co-author on ~50 papers and book chapters, many of which are regularly cited by other experts.
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.
Alex Faaborg
Alex Faaborg is a principal designer at Mozilla, where he focuses on the visual and interactive design of Firefox. He also contributes to Mozilla Labs, which explores the next stage in the evolution of the Web and its long term future. He has extensive experience in artificial intelligence, user interface design, and cognitive science and is a graduate of the MIT Media Laboratory.
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.
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.
Connie Malamed
Connie Malamed consults, presents and writes at the intersection of cognitive psychology, visual communication and learning. She is the author of Visual Language For Designers: Creating Graphics That People Understand. Connie writes regularly at Understanding Graphics and is the principal of Connie Malamed Consulting.
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.
Jeffrey Powers
Jeffrey Powers was a PhD student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, but left early to start Occipital after realizing that the fastest way to make an impact was to start a company. While in Ann Arbor, he led a robotics research project involving autonomous flying blimps, he was elected chapter president of the engineering society Tau Beta Pi, helped build a collaborative filtering engine at Xanga.com, and spent two summers as an intern at the NSA.
Vikas Reddy
Vikas Reddy is co-founder of Occipital, a mobile computer vision startup based in Boulder, CO. In his almost non-existent spare time, he writes at AwkwardRules.com, runs on various trails, plays tennis, and reads sci-fi and history. Vikas has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Michigan, and minors in Mathematics and History. He has previously worked at NYC based startup Xanga.com and IBM.
Jeremy Olson
Jeremy has always been right at the intersection of design and software. As a homeschooled kid, he always loved art and was delighted to discover software development as an outlet for his creativity. After ten years of building software, Jeremy landed his first big success at the age of 19 as a Sophomore at UNC Charlotte when he built an iPhone app called Grades. Apple not only featured Grades on the App Store homepage, but awarded the second version the coveted Apple Design Award in 2011 and Grades has since become one of the most popular Education apps on the App Store, being featured in national press such as Fox News and the Huffington Post. Now a senior, Jeremy has transformed his company Tapity into a full time business and his team works with startups and big brands alike to craft delightful apps for iOS.
Jonathan Gosier
Jonathan Gosier is a designer, software developer, lover of data science and the co-founder of metaLayer.com which he refers to as 'Photoshop for data'. metaLayer makes products that make dealing with information overload problems a visual experience.
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.
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.
Jared Lewandowski
Jared Lewandowski began his career in the midwest in the late 90's and now currently resides in the Bay Area. He's worked on many successful medical and financial websites, improved various products, built many successful brands, and has presented on strategy, accessibility, and usability to large and small businesses around the United States. He currently manages a UX team at GoDaddy and runs his own design agency, JL Design Group.
Brice Stokes
Brice Stokes is a Manager in the Digital Access Marketing group leading a User Experience (UX) design group in support of FedEx IT and Marketing stakeholders. The team is focused on improving the up front requirements gathering process and developing early stage prototype designs well in advance of the traditional development phase. Over the past 10 years in the Digital Access marketing group, Brice managed various applications on fedex.com, such as online tracking, shipping, and billing, and led several strategic corporate initiatives centered on Quality Improvement and Innovation. FedEx supports more than 13 million digital customer transactions each business day, and a focus on UX is paramount in providing a superior customer experience to the marketplace. Prior to joining FedEx, he spent time as brand project manager at Leopard, leading several eCommerce initiatives targeting the supply chain and procurement sector. Brice is a member of the Forrester Customer Experience Council, holds a B.A. from Millsaps College in Jackson, MS, and obtained his MBA from the University of Colorado.
Thomas Wicinski
Thomas Wicinski is VP, Digital Access Marketing for Fedex Services. Under Tom Wicinski’s leadership, the Digital Access Marketing team has responsibility for developing, managing and launching market leading software, web services and fedex.com to enable customers and partners access to all business services offered by FedEx. He has been in this role since Nov 2007. Previously, Tom served as Director, Customer Management Analytics in FedEx Services for 9 years. Tom’s vast experience in Customer Management Analytics and his proven ability to transform the CMA team from a small, marketing campaign-focused organization to a large customer-focused organization has prepared him to champion the FedEx Compete Collectively, Manage Collaboratively philosophy for the Embedded and Partner Access team. Tom joined FedEx in 1992 in Pricing and later became a Manager in Marketing Analysis in 1995. Tom earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech (’90) and a master’s of business administration degree from the University of Georgia (’92). Under his leadership, FedEx Marketing received awards from the Data Warehousing Institute and the Direct Marketing Association recognizing their success with the Customer Relationship Marketing initiative. Tom is also a two-time recipient of the FedEx CEO Five Star Award. On the personal side, he has been married for 17 years to LeighAnn, a fellow Georgia Bulldog, and has two children, Scott (10) and Lauren (6). His hobbies include keeping up with the kids, and an occasional round of golf. He loves playing sports, but does not play any one particularly well.
Mike Downey
Senior Editor, UX Magazine Mike Downey is Principal Evangelist, Platform Evangelism at Microsoft where he focuses on platform adoption of Microsoft Silverlight and related technologies. With a long history in developing software for web and mobile application development and rich media delivery, Mike has amassed a great deal of experience with gathering and prioritizing feature requirements, tailoring product messaging for target audiences, building and delivering exceptional product presentations that engage audiences and drive sales, creating innovative new ways to maximize revenue—particularly with mature product lines, and working with engineering teams to better understand their customers. Mike was formerly the Principal Evangelist for the Platform Business Development team at Adobe Systems focusing on promoting Adobe’s platform technologies including Flash, Flex, and AIR. Mike joined the AIR team as Senior Product Manager in December of 2006 before moving to his role in business development. Prior to joining the AIR product team Mike spent four years as Senior Product Manager for Flash.
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.
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.
Alex Faaborg
Alex Faaborg is a principal designer at Mozilla, where he focuses on the visual and interactive design of Firefox. He also contributes to Mozilla Labs, which explores the next stage in the evolution of the Web and its long term future. He has extensive experience in artificial intelligence, user interface design, and cognitive science and is a graduate of the MIT Media Laboratory.
Mark Hurst
Mark Hurst is an entrepreneur and writer concerned with the idea of “good experience” - in particular, what enables or detracts from meaningful experiences of creativity, technology, community, and life. Every spring in New York he runs the Gel conference, spotlighting heroes and innovators of good experience in a variety of fields. There are many videos online of past Gel talks. Hurst also writes Good Experience as a blog and email newsletter for tens of thousands of readers. In 1997 Hurst founded Creative Good, a firm devoted to helping business create better experiences for their customers and employees. He runs it with business partner Phil Terry. Hurst has also created the annual Uncle Mark product guide; a list of good games online; an online to do list, and several other harebrained labors of love. A couple of years ago Mark’s site “This Is Broken” became popular, but it got to be so much work that now it’s a purely user-generated Flickr group. His 2007 book Bit Literacy proposed a basic set of skills to overcome information overload. Douglas Rushkoff wrote, “Mark Hurst is the smartest person thinking about ways technology can make our lives easier rather than harder.” Hurst began his Internet career as a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab, then worked with Seth Godin at Yoyodyne. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from MIT and lives in New York City with his wife and son. He’s also on Twitter and Facebook.
Michael merged his skills in graphic design and multimedia into a career in User Experience Design after graduating with a B.S. in Jazz in 1989. He has delivered projects for clients including Kenneth Cole, Merrill Lynch, Apple, Time Warner, NFL Properties, AOL, Toshiba and W&R Grace. He has spent the last 20 years designing great experiences. Visit his UX Blog, his website, or follow him on Twitter.
Megan O. Read
Megan O. Read has worked in the design industry for 15 years. She earned her BA in Art with an emphasis in graphic design from San Diego State University in 2000, and has been continuing her education in software, design, writing and client relationships ever since. In addition to owning and operating her own craft website radmegan.com, she works for the online software training company lynda.com as the author relations manager, and is a regular contributor to the lynda.com blog. For more information on the available courses and subscriptions at lynda.com check out the lynda.com website. And check out Megan's weekly blog posts at blog.lynda.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @radmegan.
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.
As Design Education Strategist for Cooper, Teresa Brazen pulls from her experience across many disciplines (film, design, journalism) to inspire curriculum, teach, and build community. Her passion is teaching others how to cultivate healthy, inspired cultures within projects, teams and organizations—no matter what their role. Through her current work as a trainer (Cooper) and previous experience in program management (Adaptive Path), she's had the unique privilege of collaborating with, nurturing, and empowering teams from a broad range of industries: global financial institutions, Silicon Valley startups, and everything in-between. She also created and programs the Cooper Parlor event series, a monthly gathering of designers and design advocates to exchange ideas and push the potential for design.
In her free time, she also continue her work as an artist. In her short films and artwork, she explores how people navigate experiences like love, secrecy, and judgment. In her podcast series, she interviews people at the edges of industry and culture. She's obsessed with uncovering what makes people tick and exposing our shared humanity…in service of fostering a bit more empathy in the world. More about Teresa at TeresaBrazen.com and @TeresaBrazen.
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.
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.
Jesse Zolna
Jesse Zolna is currently Manager of User Research at BN.com in NYC. He has a Ph.D. in Engineering Psychology, aka Human Factors or Human-Computer Interaction, earned at Georgia Institute of Technology. Since 1999, he has conducted Qualitative and Quantitative research to improve consumer packaged goods, web sites, software, and hardware devices. Jesse is constantly seeking to develop new and innovative ways to uncover user needs, behaviors, and attitudes so that he can advise product designers about effective ways to improve user experiences.
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.
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
Dominique Leca
Dominique Leca is a 25-year old entrepreneur based in Paris, France. He co-founded a company specialized in iPhone application development in early 2008. As Publishing Manager there, he designed: allRadio 2, Geomaster, EarthSecrets and Fracture. He collaborated on many iPhone application projects for major French companies and brand Dominique graduated from the HEC Business School in 2008, and had prior experiences in finance and advertisement. He blogs at dominiqueleca.com and can always be reached via Twitter @domleca.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.