Expert Speakers

For the UI14 conference, we’ve sought out experts who have the most advanced thought on the topics designers want to hear. We’ve recruited a fabulous group of speakers, ready to help you solve your biggest design problems.

UI14 Keynote Speaker

Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

Jared M. Spool

Jared M. Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering, the largest usability research organization of its kind in the world. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective and 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 annual UI Conference and Web App Summit, 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.

Scott Berkun, scottberkun.com

Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun is the best selling author of Making Things Happen (formerly titled the Art of Project Management) and The Myths of Innovation. He worked at Microsoft from 1994-2003, as a usability engineer, design evangelist, and program manager, and worked on Internet Explorer v1.0 to 5.0. Since 2003 he has worked as an independent author and lecturer. His work as a writer and public speaker has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired magazine, he was regular expert on the Business of Innovation series on CNBC, is a commentator on MSNBC and National Public Radio, and he blogs on management and creative thinking. You can also follow Scott on Twitter.

Leah Buley , Experience Designer, Adaptive Path

Leah Buley

Leah Buley is an experience designer for Adaptive Path. She is interested in the potential of user experience design to help businesses make better decisions. She has worked with organizations in a variety of industries, including financial, legal, telecom, and non-profit.

Before Adaptive Path, Leah was a user interface designer for Barclays Global Investors. She designed transactional financial systems, client-facing web sites, end-investor tools, and internal applications. She also championed firm-wide education and better integration of user experience design into the project lifecycle. Before Barclays Global Investors, Leah worked for New York interactive agencies Flat and Plural, and LA-based BMC, an information services company. Leah started her career in design as an opinionated web developer.

Leah has a Master's degree in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University and Bachelors in American Studies from Barnard College.

She is a member of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and the Information Architecture Institute.

Dana E. Chisnell, Usability and User Research Consultant, UsabilityWorks

Dana Chisnell

Dana is an independent usability consultant and user researcher who founded UsabilityWorks in San Francisco, CA. She has been doing usability research, user interface design, and technical communications consulting and development since 1982.

Dana took part in her first usability test, on a mainframe office system developed by IBM in 1983, while she was working as a research assistant at the Document Design Center. It was on a mainframe office system developed by IBM. Since then, she has worked with hundreds of study participants, for dozens of clients, to learn about design issues in software, hardware, web sites, online services, games, and ballots (and probably other things that are better forgotten about). She has helped companies like Yahoo!, Intuit, AARP, Wells Fargo, E*TRADE, Sun Microsystems, and RLG (now OCLC) perform usability tests and other user research to inform and improve the designs of their products and services.

Dana’s colleagues consider her an expert in usability issues for older adults and plain language. (She says she’s still learning.) Lately, she has been working on issues related to ballot design and usability and accessibility in voting.

Gerry McGovern , CEO, Customer Carewords

Gerry McGovern

Gerry McGovern is widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing web content as a business asset. In 2004, Gerry was included in the 100 most influential figures in e-commerce in the UK and Ireland, as part of "An Internet Decade", which was organized by NOP World and E-Consultancy. In 2006, he was described by The Irish Times as one of five visionaries who had had a major impact on the development of the Web. In 2000, he received the Web Ireland Internet Industry Person of the Year award.

Gerry McGovern has spoken, written, and consulted extensively on web content management issues over the last decade. He has written numerous books. In 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." Knowledge Management Review described it as a "bible" of content management. In 2006, he published Killer Web Content (Bloomsbury / A&C Black). Suzanne Sowinska, Manager, Content Publishing Excellence, Microsoft Corporation described it as "essential reading". Bev Godwin, Director, FirstGov.gov: The U.S. Government's Official Web Portal, said about the book: "Genius! Gerry McGovern gets it! If you read ONE book on managing a Web site, this is it."

Gerry has appeared on BBC, CNN and CNBC television, partaken in various radio shows, and featured in numerous print media publications. Gerry has been nominated as best overall speaker at numerous conferences. Follow Gerry on Twitter.

Ginny Redish, President, Redish & Associates, Inc

Ginny Redish

Janice (Ginny) Redish helps companies and agencies bring user-centered design into their processes. She helps government agencies and private companies create successful web sites by training their web content writers, web developers, and web managers. She helps improve their web sites through her expertise in plain language and usability. Ginny is sought after as a speaker and workshop leader. She is a dynamic instructor who has trained thousands of writers and subject matter specialists in the U.S., Canada, Asia, and Europe in writing for the web and other topics. Ginny has keynoted conferences in the U. S., England, Norway, and Slovenia; and just a few months ago, she gave the keynote for User Friendly 2008, the annual conference of the China Chapter of the Usability Professionals' Association.

Ginny is the author of Letting Go of the Words and The Practical Guide to Usability Testing. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University.

Dan Rubin , Webgraph

Dan Rubin

Dan Rubin is a highly accomplished user interface designer and usability consultant, with over ten years of experience as a leader in the fields of web standards and usability, specifically focusing on the use of (X)HTML and CSS to streamline development and improve accessibility.

His passion for all things creative and artistic isn't a solely selfish endeavor either—you'll frequently find him waxing educational about a cappella jazz and barbershop harmony, interface design, usability, web standards, typography, and graphic design in general.

In addition to his contributions to sites including Blogger, the CSS Zen Garden, Yahoo! Small Business and Microsoft's ASP.net portal, Dan is a contributing author of Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation (2nd Edition, friends of ED, 2003), technical reviewer for Beginning CSS Web Development (Apress, 2006), The Art & Science of CSS (SitePoint, 2007) and Sexy Web Design (SitePoint, 2009), coauthor of Pro CSS Techniques (Apress, 2006), and Web Standards Creativity (friends of ED, 2007). Dan also writes about web standards, design and life in general on his blog, SuperfluousBanter, and spends his professional time on a variety of online and offline projects for Sidebar Creative, Webgraph, and Black Seagull, and consults on design, user interaction and online publishing for Garcia Media. You can follow Dan on Twitter.

Donna Spencer, maadmob

Donna Maurer

Donna’s a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer. That’s a fancy way of saying she plans how to present the things you see on your computer screen, so that they’re easy to understand, engaging and compelling. Things like the navigation, forms, categories and words on intranets, websites, web applications and business systems.

Most of the projects Donna works on are large, messy monsters, like government websites and intranets, internal business applications and web applications. But she still gets to work on something small and funky too. So she’s intimately aware of the challenges of both long-term, ongoing projects and short-burst, agile programming type engagements. She’s also an old hand at sketching screens, drawing wireframes and building prototypes.

There's one common requirement regardless of the job. She has to comprehensively understand the needs of the user. Only then can she make the system as usable as possible. Luckily, she’s also quite fond of people, so doing user research and running usability tests is a pleasure, not a pain.

Donna's a very experienced speaker and regularly holds workshops and speaks at local and international conferences, on the topics of information architecture, interaction design, the web, writing and more. She even runs a user experience conference (UX Australia).

Donna’s been doing this since 2002. She’s worked on the boards of the Information Architecture Institute (international) and Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA). She’s also written a book on card sorting.

Todd Zaki Warfel, Founder and Principal Designer, Messagefirst

Todd Zaki Warfel

Todd Zaki Warfel has been designing interactive products and services for over 15 years. Todd’s clients have included fortune 500 companies like AT&T Wireless, Bankrate, Citibank, and Comcast, as well as smaller companies like Numara and rPath. An internationally recognized thought leader on research and design, and member of the Web Standards Project Education Task Force, he has spoken at conferences and taught workshops around the globe. 

Todd's upcoming book, Practical Prototyping (Rosenfeld Media) will discuss how prototypes are more than just a design tool and show you how to use prototyping to create a common language, market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team. Anticipated publication is in 2009.

Todd currently lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son, he often blogs and can be found on Twitter.