Jon Boutelle, Uzanto

Jonathan Boutelle (email jon AT uzanto.com) is a CTO at Uzanto - a UX consulting company that also builds it's own web products. He was the software architect behind the companies two products: MindCanvas (game-like surveys for design research) and Slideshare (online social sharing of slideshows).

A software engineer by training, his interests lie at the intersection of technology, business, and customer experience. He studied Computer Science at Brown University, and previously worked as a software engineer for Advanced Visual Systems (a data visualization company) and CommerceOne (a B2B enterprise software company). He writes an occasional article on his blog.

Kevin Cheng, Yahoo!

By day, Kevin is a senior interaction designer with Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Local. By night, he is the co-creator of OK/Cancel, believed to be one of the top five web comics on usability and design. At Yahoo!, Kevin combined his experiences and introduced the use of comics for conveying new product ideas and concepts. Previous to Yahoo!, he worked as a senior human-computer interaction consultant at Trilogy for clients such as Sun Microsystems, British Airways, SGI, and Principal Financial Group and also contracted with Adaptive Path.

Kevin holds a Masters degree from University College London in Human Computer Interaction and Ergonomics and has presented at SIGCHI, UXNet London, Hong Kong UPA and will also be speaking at this year’s South by Southwest (SxSW). His work in communicating interaction design issues through comics has appeared in numerous textbooks as well as the bimonthly Interactions magazine

Larry Constantine, Constantine and Lockwood

Larry Constantine, IDSA, is an award-winning designer specializing in interaction design and techniques for enhancing user performance in complex performance-critical applications. A persistent innovator with a string of patents in human-machine interaction to his credit, he is an internationally recognized leader in design methodology and product usability. With Lucy Lockwood, he developed usage-centered design, the widely practiced model-driven process based on essential use cases. He has published more than 150 articles and papers and 17 books in both the human sciences and computer sciences, including, with Lucy Lockwood, Software for Use, winner of the Jolt Award as best book of 1999. His papers have been widely reprinted and his books have been translated into nine languages. Highly regarded as a presenter and teacher, he has taught in 20 countries and keynoted numerous international conferences. His clients have included leading technology companies around the world. He is Chief Scientist with Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd., the design, training, and consulting firm he co-founded, and director of LabUSE, the Laboratory for Usage-centered Software Engineering, a research and development group based at the University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal.

Sean Kane, Netflix

Sean Kane is the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, the world's leading online DVD rental service. Sean leads a team of developers to create the Ajax-rich web experience for Netflix. Sean's responsibility for Netflix's UI framework has included developing several of the Ajax interactions and features on the Netflix web site, in addition to guiding the UI framework architecture. During Sean's time at Netflix, the website has been rated by independent researchers as number one in the world for customer satisfaction for two consecutive years.

Before joining Netflix in 2002, Sean was the Lead UI Engineer, architecting the JSP framework for the Kleiner-Perkins startup Bigvine.com; one of the first B2B marketplaces on the web. In 2001, Sean was the Web Engineering Manager at AllBusiness.com, and back in 1998, a web developer at AltaVista doing DHTML feature development.

David Malouf, Symbol Technologies

David Malouf is known for being a passionate spokesperson for the discipline of Interaction Design (IxD). Founding the Interaction Design Association (IXDA) and becoming its first Vice President have been done with a keen eye towards evangelizing IxD in the areas of practice, research, and education.

As a prolific blog writer on topics relating to IxD and User Experience (UX), David has focused mainly on the areas of convergence between technology as an enabling device for creating richer interaction models. In his writing on the topic of Rich Internet Applications for Boxes and Arrows and UXMatters, he has taken both an approach towards provocation and practicality. His goals are always centered on igniting community discourse as a means in the end of advancing the ways we look at RIAs.

David is currently a Senior User Experience Designer at Symbol Technologies, where he designs a wide array of complex system applications as well as software to run on various types of handheld devices. Over the last 7 years David has designed RIAs ranging from e-commerce sites to enterprise software platforms utilizing a range of technologies including, Java, .NET, Flash, and AJAX.

Matt May, Web Accessibility Specialist

Matt May is a developer, technologist, and accessibility advocate. His resume includes user experience design, technical architecture, and standards development and advocacy. At W3C/WAI, he worked on many of the standards for Web accessibility, and he continues to participate in the Web Standards Project's Accessibility Task Force.

Peter Merholz, Director of Practice Development, Adaptive Path

Peter Merholz is the Director of Practice Development and a founding partner of Adaptive Path. He is an experienced information architect, writer, speaker, and leader in the field of user-experience design. Clients include Cathay Pacific, Yamaha, and the California Health Care Foundation.

Peter's major projects at Adaptive Path include unifying PeopleSoft's three disparate Web properties into one unified presence, conducting research on health care policy for CHCF, recommending improvements for Yamaha's next generation digital keyboards, and helping Intel wrangle their massive set of product offerings into a manageable experience.

Peter is a regular speaker at Web design and information architecture conferences, such as ASIS&T's Information Architecture Summits (years 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004). He keynoted both the Institute of Design's 2003 About With and For conference, and 2004 SIGCHI.NL, the premiere Dutch HCI conference.

Joshua Porter, User Interface Engineering

Joshua is a leading member of UIE's research team and has written extensively on such topics as Web 2.0, Ajax, web standards, and on-site search systems. Josh shares many of his design thoughts and commentaries on his personal blog: Bokardo.com.

Josh is responsible for overseeing the development of the User Interface Engineering's web sites, managing UIE's top notch team of web developers.

Josh received his Master’s degree in Information Technology and his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He brings with him extensive experience and knowledge in the areas of human factors, usability testing, and web site design and development.

Hagan Rivers, Principal, Two Rivers Consulting

Hagan Rivers is a pioneer designer of web applications who has worked on several of the web's most sophisticated applications. 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 has been a top-rated presenter at dozens of speaking engagements around the world, including her many appearances at UIE's User Interface Conference.

Christian Rohrer, eBay

Christian Rohrer is the Director of User Experience Research at eBay, where he leads a team of researchers and analysts focused on delivering user insights to inspire, inform, and assess user experience and product designs, utilizing methods such as ethnography, usability, data mining, and survey research. He is a founding member of the eBay Research Council, an executive-sponsored body that advises the company on best research practices and developed processes that coordinate efforts between team members in market research, community outreach, international research, and user experience research. He was previously Director of User Experience Research at Yahoo!, where he was also a founding member of the Yahoo! Research Council there. Prior to Yahoo!, he conducted ethnographic research for NCI (now Liberate), focusing on the processes and strategies employed by people learning to use TV-based Internet appliances in the home. Rohrer received his Ph.D in symbolic systems in education (cognitive science) from Stanford University and a B.A. in computer and information sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Earlier in his career, he spent seven years working as an independent consultant and support engineer at SCO.

Bill Scott, Ajax Evangelist, Yahoo!

Bill Scott is the Yahoo! Ajax Evangelist and a Design Manager for Yahoo!'s recently released Design Pattern Library. Bill works closely with teams throughout Yahoo! to spread the goodness of "rich and sane" design for Ajax solutions. Before joining Yahoo!, Bill co-founded Rico, an opensource Ajax framework while also founding a User Experience Team, architecting a JSP/Struts Web framework and a Java Swing framework for Sabre. Over the past 20 years Bill has been involved in designing and creating user interfaces for video games, military war games, 3D graphics, oil and gas research, software development environments, supply chain planning, and various other scientific and business domains. He posts his musings about user experience on his blog.

Rashmi Sinha, Uzanto

Rashmi Sinha is the founding principal of Uzanto - a UX consulting company that also builds it's own web products. MindCanvas (their first product) provides game-like web surveys that let UX and market researchers gather user insights without leaving your desk. Slideshare (their second product) is a way to share and discover slideshows online.

As part of Uzanto's consulting practice, Rashmi advises companies on customer research strategies and social software. She writes a blog at rashmisinha.com using a social and cognitive lens to examine people's interactions with technology. Recently, she has focused on social technologies such as tagging, and web-based sharing of media.

Prior to Uzanto, Rashmi worked as a researcher at the School of Information Management, UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Brown University. She is also co-Program Chair of the monthly BayCHI Program.

Brandon Schauer, Design Strategist Adaptive Path

Brandon Schauer is a design strategist for Adaptive Path. He has nearly a decade of experience developing new products, services, and user experiences on the Web, handhelds, and beyond.

His passion for finding and understanding the unmet needs of customers has led him to diverse environments, from the homes of cancer patients to tunnels beneath Walt Disney World. Through this insight into customers' needs, a solid grounding in business analysis, and mastery of methods for design and innovation, Brandon has helped organizations such as Morgan Stanley and Motorola to craft better experiences for their users. Prior to joining Adaptive Path he was a Manager of User Experience at Sapient, a business consulting and technology services company.

Jared Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

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 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 UI11 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.

Thomas Vander Wal, Principal and Senior Consultant, InfoCloud Solutions

Thomas Vander Wal has a broad background in information management, encompassing information architecture, interaction design, web development and information design. Thomas has 18 years of professional experience in the web and information technology sector. He has spoken on information architecture, interaction design, accessibility, web standards, the future of web development, and user-centered design at IA Summit, STC, SXSW, Design Engaged, WebVisions, Web Directions, many CHI conferences, and various workshops in North America, Europe, and around the Pacific Rim. He has been written about in many publications including, The New York Times, Business Week, MIT Technology Review, and many others. Thomas helped found Boxes and Arrows and the Information Architecture Institute (Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture), and is currently on the Steering Committee for the Web Standards Project. In 2004 he coined the term Folksonomy and is researching, advising, and developing tagging systems and services. He is the founder and principal of InfoCloud Solutions, Inc., a web consulting and product development firm.

Luke Wroblewski, Principal Designer, Yahoo!

Luke Wroblewski is an experienced interface designer, strategist, and author. He is currently a Principal Designer at Yahoo! Inc. and Principal of LukeW Interface Designs, a digital product design consultancy he founded in 1996. Luke has authored a groundbreaking book on Web interface design principles, Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability, as well as numerous articles featured in his own online publication, Functioning Form. Luke is a member of the board of directors of the Interaction Design Association and a frequent presenter on topics related to Web Design.

Previously, Luke was the Lead User Interface Designer of eBay Inc.’s platform team. At eBay, he led the strategic design of new consumer products and internal processes including design pattern and creative asset management systems. Luke also taught interface design courses in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois and worked as a Senior Interface Designer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.