UIE Web App Masters Tour: Now hear this: 15 Hours of Audio Recordings from 11 Masters Listen to them OnDemand

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Expert Speakers

For the UI10 conference, we’ve sought out experts who have the most advanced thought on the topics designers want to hear. To celebrate our 10th Anniversary, we’ve recruited a fabulous group of speakers, ready to help you solve your biggest design problems.

Spotlight Plenary Speaker

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the best-selling book, Flow:The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the C.S. and D.J. Davidson Professor of Psychology at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University and Director of the Quality of Life Research Center.  He is a former professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. 

Professor Csikszentmihalyi is the author of 15 books and over 200 scholarly articles on creativity and optimal performance.  Drawing upon years of systematic research, he invented the concept of flow as a metaphorical description of the rare mental state associated with feelings of optimal satisfaction and fulfillment.  His analysis of the internal and external conditions giving rise to flow show that it is almost always linked to circumstances of high challenge when personal skills are used to the utmost.  He has been a visiting professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, the University of Illinois, the University of Milan, the University of Alberta, Escola Paulista de Medecina in São Paulo, Brazil, Duquesne University, the University of Maine, the University of Jyvakyla in Finland, and the British Psychological Society.

In recent years, in collaboration with psychologists Howard Gardner and William Damon, Professor Csikszentmihalyi has embarked on a study of GoodWork - work that is at once excellent in quality and also socially responsible.

  • On Thursday, October 13th, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi will present the Spotlight Plenary at User Interface 10.

UI10 Keynote Speaker

Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

Jared M. Spool

Jared M. Spool is founder of User Interface Engineering, the largest usability research organization of it’s kind in the world. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers.

Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the UI10 Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is author of the book, Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide.

Bryan Eisenberg, Principal, Future Now

Bryan Eisenberg

One of the principals and CPO (Chief Persuasion Officer) of Future Now, Inc., Bryan has been helping companies realize that to maximize results it is essential to incorporate expert persuasion techniques into website design, email marketing, development and implementation. He is the publisher of Future Now’s award-winning newsletter GrokDotCom, is the author of the weekly ClickZ column “ROI Marketing”, has been a featured speaker at numerous e-business events both in the United States and overseas. The application of his vision and processes have helped Future Now clients increase their conversion rates not just by percents but by multiples.

In addition to his background in both e-commerce and in technology, his eclectic background also includes thought leadership in the critical area of internet marketing, website development and design, and web analytics. Bryan is also a member of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, Usability Professionals' Association and the American Society for Quality. A successful entrepreneur in his own right, he also has consulted to and run seminars for numerous corporations, large and small, both on-line and in the real world. He holds a B.A. from Brooklyn College, CUNY, and did graduate work at The Wurzweiler School. Bryan is also adjunct faculty of Roy H William's Wizard Academy and is a co-author of Persuasive Online Copywriting and The Marketer's Common Sense Guide to E-Metrics.

Jeffrey Eisenberg, Founder, Future Now

Jeffrey Eisenberg

Jeffrey Eisenberg co-founded Future Now, Inc., in 1998 with his brother Bryan. Jeffrey has been and is currently CEO of Future Now a marketing consulting boutique, based in New York City, focused on helping its clients increase their conversion rates online. Jeffrey is also CEO of Persuasion Architecture Inc., a licensing and training company.

Jeffrey has become a well respected expert in the field of eBusiness. Jeffrey has guest moderated I-Sales and has been a featured speaker at DMDAYS, National Association of Broadcasters Annual, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Net.Marketing, SCORE conferences, DMA Annual, Wizard Academy and ClickZ Email Strategies. Jeffrey has run seminars for companies like: Computer Associates, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, AeroTek/ Allegis Group, Volvo, Computer Associates, Agora Inc., and RADirect. Jeffrey is also a co- inventor of MAPTM, the proprietary version of Persuasion Architecture that is patent pending and is a co-author of the book, Persuasive Online Copywriting.

Previous to co-founding Future Now, Jeffrey developed his expertise in offline sales and marketing as well as in sales and marketing management and training working for companies like IDT, Central National Bank, NYFX, Nuestra Voz, Bridges, Rich & Wheeler, GWC and Bridges East Africa.

Kim Goodwin, Vice President of Design and General Manager, Cooper

Kim Goodwin

Kim Goodwin's design expertise and teaching skills have made her popular as a speaker at conferences, universities, and corporate events. At Cooper, Kim applies her years of experience as a creative director to ensure excellent delivery of Cooper's design consulting and training services. Kim has played a major role in developing Cooper's Goal-Directed methods and has led the effort to turn those methods into an interaction design curriculum. Kim has led a wide range of design projects, from e-commerce applications to information appliances, IP telephony systems, and healthcare applications. In addition to her work with clients and industry leadership, Kim provides career management to designers, works with the Director of Design R&D to improve Cooper's design methods, and keeps the design department running smoothly.

Kelly Goto, Principal and Founder, gotomedia

Kelly Goto

Kelly Goto is the principal and founder of gotomedia, inc., a San Francisco-based strategic consultancy specializing in user experience, research and interaction design. As a design ethnographer, Kelly continues to seek new methods of applying research-oriented design to interfaces, products, and mobile devices for clients such as Adobe, Apple, Macromedia, Veritas, and Bearing Point. With over 16 years of experience in the industry, Kelly has worked as a strategist and consultant for companies such as Verizon Wireless, Warner Bros. Online, the Blue Cross, Genentech and Wells Fargo.

Kelly is a sought after international lecturer on the topics of branding, user experience, usability and design ethnography. Her book, Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow that Works is currently a bestseller in the technology industry and has quickly become a standard for workflow and user-centered design principles.

Molly E. Holzschlag, Molly.com

Molly Holzschlag

Molly E. Holzschlag is coined "one of the greatest digerati" and deemed one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women on the Web. Molly E. Holzschlag is one of the most vibrant and influential people around. With over 25 Web development book titles to her credit, Molly currently serves as Communications Director for the World Organization of Webmasters.

As a steering committee member for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), Molly works along with a group of other dedicated Web developers and designers to promote W3C recommendations. She also teaches Webmaster courses for the University of Arizona, University of Phoenix, and Pima Community College. She wrote the very popular column, Integrated Design, for Web Techniques Magazine for the last three years of its life, and spent a year as Executive Editor of WebReview.com.

Gerry McGovern, Gerrymcgovern.com

Gerry McGovern

Gerry McGovern has spoken, written, and consulted extensively on web content management issues over the last eight years. His areas of specialty are writing and laying out content for the Web, information architecture design (metadata, classification, navigation, search), and development of a content management strategy, for which he has created a proprietary methodology.

In October 2001, he published two books, entitled: Content Critical and The Web Content Style Guide. Design Research News stated that Content Critical, "should be on the reading list of every course in web design." Since 1996, Gerry has written New Thinking, a widely read weekly e-mail newsletter covering the role of content on the Web.

Eric A. Meyer, Principal Consultant, Complex Spiral Associates

Eric A Meyer

Eric A Meyer has been working with the Web since late 1993. He is the founder and Principal Consultant at Complex Spiral Consulting. A graduate of and former Webmaster for Case Western Reserve University, Eric coordinated the authoring and creation of the W3C’s CSS Test Suite and has recently been pushing the limits of CSS-based design as hard as he can.

Author of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide 2nd Edition (O’Reilly & Associates) and More Eric Meyer on CSS (New Riders) and the fairly well-known CSS Browser Compatibility Charts, Eric speaks at a variety of conferences on the subject of standards, CSS use, and Web design. He is also the host of "Your Father’s Oldsmobile," a weekly Big Band-era radio show heard on WRUW 91.1-FM in Cleveland. When not otherwise busy, Eric is usually bothering his wife Kat in some fashion.

Rolf Molich, Founder, Dialog Design

Rolf Molich

Rolf Molich owns and manages DialogDesign, a small Danish usability consultancy. Rolf created and coordinated the comparative usability evaluation (CUE) studies which offer advanced usability practitioners the valuable insights necessary to improve their usability testing practices. In these groundbreaking studies, more than 40 professional usability teams tested the same applications.

Rolf was a principal investigator in the Nielsen Norman Group's large-scale usability test of 20 US e-commerce websites involving more than 60 users. He has worked in usability study since 1984, is the co-inventor of the heuristic inspection method (with Jakob Nielsen), and is the author of the best-selling Danish book User Friendly Computer Systems, which has sold 25,000 copies to date. Rolf is an experienced speaker.

Christine Perfetti, Director, Business Planning & Strategy, User Interface Engineering

Christine Perfetti

As one of the most requested instructors at User Interface Engineering, Christine has worked with dozens of companies on their toughest web design problems. With her extensive knowledge of human factors, task design, user recruitment, and usability testing practices, Christine has been a top-rated presenter at CHI 2001 and 2002, the UIE Research Forums, Intranets 2001, and STC regional conferences. She has also taught Human Factors at the Tufts University Gordon Institute for Engineering Management.

Christine previously worked at Fidelity Investments, where she was an influential member of their highly-talented instructional design team. At Fidelity, she specialized in the areas of corporate training, instructional design, project management, and web-site design and development. She received her Master’s degree in Experimental Psychology from Brown University.

Joshua Porter, Research Consultant, User Interface Engineering

Joshua Porter

Joshua Porter is an instrumental member of the company’s research team and a researcher on such topics as on-site search systems and cross-browser compatibility issues. In his spare time, he also drives the development of the company web site.

Joshua received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and his Master’s degree in Information Technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has worked for several years as an independent web designer. He brings with him extensive experience and knowledge in the areas of human factors, usability testing, and web site design and development.

Marc Rettig, Founder, Fit Associates

Marc Rettig

Marc Rettig is the Founder of Fit Associates.After a twelve-year first career as a software developer, Marc is now thirteen years into a second career as a designer, educator, and researcher. As someone committed to shipping "design that fits people's lives", Marc's work facilitates interdisciplinary efforts to translate customer research into good design and strategy. Recent clients include Whirlpool, BBC, the U.S. Army, Crate and Barrel, and Microsoft.

Marc has taught both lecture and studio courses at Carnegie Mellon's Graduate School of Design (where he was the 2003 Nierenberg Chair of Design) and the Institute of Design, IIT, in Chicago. He was Chief Experience Officer of HannaHodge, and a Director of User Experience at Cambridge Technology Partners. Prior to that he was a consultant with seeSpace, VP of Design for Digital Knowledge Assets, and a Senior Architect in Andersen Consulting's Advanced Technologies Group.

Hagan Rivers, Partner, Two Rivers Consulting

Hagan Rivers

Hagan’s desire to design complex and elegant applications has placed her at the cutting edge of interaction design for each of the 15 years since receiving her Computer Science degree from MIT. She was the lead designer of Netscape from version 1.0 through 4.0, simultaneously designing on Windows, Mac, and Motif and in HTML. Hagan profoundly affected both the design of the internet and design for the internet.

Hagan worked on some of the very first web based interfaces and she continues to push the envelope of web application design in her current role as a partner at Two Rivers Consulting. She has designed and improved upon software for the general population, healthcare and insurance professionals, analysts, retailers, scientists, system administrators. Her clients have included large and emerging companies, as well as nonprofit organizations and philanthropic causes.

Hagan is a top-rated presenter at each of her engagements, including her 1996 CHI tutorial Designing for the World Wide Web and guest lectures in the MIT course, Communicating in Cyberspace.