Welcome to People You Should Follow! This week we've got some interesting names in the field of usability.
The usability experts list contains both legendary figures and some lesser known personas, yet they're still equally worth your attention.
Some of our readers asked us to expand our current list with people already present in the aforementioned links – you can find them below.
If you're into usability – this is definitely a must-see for you! Here we go: 46 Best Usability Experts You Should Follow. We prepared a handy table of contents below – use it to navigate the list!
Conversion optimization expert, marketer and user experience researcher
In my current role as a marketing and CRO consultant I apply tools such as; Analytics, Conversion Rate Optimization, Usability Testing and UX Analysis to improve ROI and exceed KPI goals. I build successful teams around corporate cultures that focus on delivering innovative, creative, and collaborative solutions for successful business results & enthusiastic customers.
Specialties: Analytics, B2B lead generation, conversion rate optimization, e-commerce, integrated marketing, marketing automation, usability testing, UX analysis, website development
User Interface Engineer & User Experience Professional
User interface developer and user experience professional with over ten years of experience developing and designing user interfaces that solve complex business problems for companies in various industries, including, but not limited to: marketing, retail, publishing, and financial services.
Chief Operating Officer at Cooper, President at IxDA
Nick is a veteran digital business and product development leader with strong ties to the global UX and interaction design communities of practice. As an accomplished sense-maker and adept storyteller, Nick can masterfully find signals amidst the noise of customer input, stakeholder priorities, and competitor actions.
Nick specializes in developing concise and inspiring narratives that illuminate a product’s performance, envisioning new scenarios, and aligning project teams around experience strategies.
Nick is known for his consultative sales approach and abilities, and for building relationships of trust with clients by communicating a concern for their priorities and a genuine interest in solving their problems.
Vice President at Frog Design, Principal at Design Impact Group Dalberg
Trying to crack the nut on design in the social impact space through creative collaborations, evidence building and force of personality.
Building a team of dreamers and doers at the Design Impact Group who share that mission and want to work exclusively on problems that we care deeply about. Design is a privilege.
Previously a senior design and user experience (UX) leader and executive at frog with deep expertise in a broad range of industries including healthcare, financial Services, enterprise software, IT, automotive, mobile devices and rich media. Areas of passion include interaction design, experience strategy, design research and user interfaces. Always searching for the next design horizon.
Nick Finck is a user experience professional who has worked in the web industry for over a decade. He specializes in information architecture, interaction design, usability and user research.
Nick has created web experiences for Fortune 500 companies including Adobe, Boeing, Google and Oprah.com. He lives and plays in Seattle, Washington, where he’s leads User Experience teams for fortune 500 companies.
Founder at BrainTraffic and ConfabEvents, Author, Content Strategy for the Web
Kristina Halvorson is widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy. She is the CEO of Brain Traffic, the coauthor of Content Strategy for the Web, and the founder of the Confab content strategy conferences.
Kristina’s work focuses on the complex processes, people, and policies that create the foundation for smart, sustainable content. Her clients include some of the world’s most recognized brands, including John Deere, MasterCard, Publix, Marriott, and Crate and Barrel. She speaks regularly at companies and conferences about how our organizations need to change to support our audience needs and expectations for content.
Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini is the third principal, along with Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman, at the Nielsen Norman Group, the “dream team” firm specializing in human-computer interaction.
Tog was lead designer at WebMD, the super-vertical start-up founded in February, 1996 by Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Before that, he was Distinguished Engineer for Strategic Technology at Sun Microsystems.
During his 14 years at Apple, he designed Apple’s first human interface and wrote eight editions of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Tog is a prolific inventor and has published two books, Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design, as well as co-authoring many others.
Amber DeRosa is a senior usability engineer working for a large financial company.
She has tested over 150 mobile users across nearly 20 mobile studies, examining native iOS and Android applications as well as responsive websites.
Since 2009, she has adapted her mobile testing techniques to maximize learnings gained from every test session. To ensure usability tests positively impact the business and our users’ experience, she regularly presents test findings with executive audiences throughout the company.
Beyond testing, executive stakeholders and product owners look to her for consultative guidance on mobile best practices and heuristic feedback. She was the founding Vice-Chair of PhillyCHI a local chapter of the ACM SIG CHI and has been an active member of the local Philadelphia UX community since 2004.
I have worked on user interface design and implementation for 20 years. I love this stuff. My approach is straightforward: understand the context, design simple, polite interactions, and always test designs with people – they surprise you every time.
Specialties: Usability testing, contextual inquiry, workflow & task analysis, interaction design, user profiling, persona development, prototyping (paper and electronic), deep knowledge of: commercial prepress and offset printing; various software development practices; engineering domains
Eva Kaniasty is the founder and Principal Consultant at Red Pill UX. Although on most projects she serves as a UX team of one, she strives to work with her clients’ teams to integrate her work into current business strategies and processes.
In addition, she maintains a wide network of other consultants, digital agencies, participant recruiters, as well as research facilities to ensure that client needs are met effectively. Eva’s expertise focuses on UX Design and Research.
She believes that the best decisions are based on a combination of qualitative research, analytics and business knowledge. She is a strategic thinker who likes to focus her work where it can have the largest impact on usability and quality of design.
Her diverse background, which in the past included web design and development, serves her well to build an understanding between disciplines and stakeholders. She understands that user experience cannot stand by itself, but must be part of a unified strategy that addresses business, marketing, and engineering concerns to design the best products.
While I understand code and can create mockups, I am not a programmer or graphic designer. I am the person who validates, tests and is the advocate for your users.
I am cross trained in web design (human factors, usability, user centered design, conversions, adaptive, mobile, accessibility), web site testing, software QA user interface, usability and functional testing, LEAN UX, SEO, WordPress, Information Architecture, WordPress, Bootstrap 3.0 and Requirements Gathering. Speaker and Columnist.
Kimberly teaches Website Usability course at Search Engine College.
User Experience (UX) Consultant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Extensive career in a variety of positions in the technology field continually focused on improving the customer experience for all users. Experience working in software and Web-based products and organizations and more recently academic environments.
Work as a User Experience (UX) professional focusing on both research and evaluation of a variety of software and Web-based products for a diverse audience. Work with online educational initiatives (MOOCs and OCW) to apply usability and accessibility methods to create solid user experiences.
Also over a dozen years of teaching practitioner-based courses within a university setting, focusing on teaching graduate-level usability, information architecture, prototyping, and user research courses. Experience also includes a long career in various positions within the technology field focusing on continually improving the user experience for end users.
I'm a multi-faceted designer with an entrepreneurial spirit. I use the best techniques of UX, Lean Startup and Agile to solve problems people care about and create profitable, sustainable businesses.
Industry experience: consumer credit, content management systems (CMS), corporate websites (B2B, B2C), education, electronic medical records, electronic trading, enterprise resource planning (ERP), finance, healthcare staffing, home video editing, insurance, long term care, online backup, online publishing, probate tax prep, recruiting, restaurant websites, scientific instruments, startups, web authoring tools.
User research, usability, plain language, accessibility. I love learning about people around the world and using those insights to design products where people matter. Author of three books: A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences (with Sarah Horton), Storytelling for User Experience (with Kevin Brooks) and Global UX: Design and Research in a Connected World (with Daniel Szuc).
Publishes, presents and teaches workshops on personas, usability and user research, plain language, and accessibility. Before I was seduced by a little beige computer into software, usability, and interface design, was a theatrical lighting designer on and off Broadway, learning about storytelling from some of the masters.
CEO at Collaborative Gain; Co-Author Customers Included
I am the Founder and CEO of Collaborative Gain, a community of senior digital leaders—peers at a range of industries—who help each other lead innovation and customer-centric change. I started The Councils (the peer network) in 2002 with Marissa Mayer and others.
I am also the co-author of "Customers Included", the book that defines my lessons learned from 20 years as a pioneer in online customer experience including 15 years running and growing the Creative Good team and overseeing hundreds of groundbreaking projects for companies like Apple and Facebook.
Carol Righi has been a practitioner of User Experience and User-Centered Design for more than 25 years. She is widely considered a UX thought leader; has extensive experience in UX research, design, and management; is widely published; and has presented at numerous professional meetings worldwide.
She is co-author of "User-Centered Design Stories"? and "User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach." Carol is a member of the Usability Professional's Association (UXPA), SIGCHI (the human-factors special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery), the Information Architecture Institute, and Gateway CHI (the St. Louis chapter of SIGCHI). She is a long-time member of the UTEST Advisory Council.
She serves on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed "Journal of Usability Studies" and is frequently sought out to review journal articles, conference submissions, books, and other scholarly and professional works. Carol was Usability Co-Chair for CHI 2007.
Ben Shneiderman is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Ben is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980). In 1986, the first edition of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction was published (5th ed., 2010, with C. Plaisant). This book is popular for his list of "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design " which is frequently taught in Human-Computer Interaction courses.
Ginny Redish helps clients and colleagues with content strategy, information design, plain language, usability, and writing for the web, including writing for social media and for the small screens of tablets and smart phones.
Most of her work today is helping clients make websites meet both business goals and site visitors' needs. All of Ginny's research, training, and writing projects are collaborative efforts with a goal of helping client teams hone their skills.
I try to make technologies fit users’ needs. These days you get all beat up about that because people don’t want to say ‘users’ anymore. ‘User centered design’ is considered too narrow; people want to talk about ‘human centered design’ and moving away from the idea of ‘use’, which has that sort of ‘office’ association.
The focus now is people living their lives with various kinds of technologies to support them. And I’m interested in the idea that the only things that are called technologies are things that don’t work yet. Nobody talks about the ‘light switch technology.’ Maybe that’s a good way to summarize where we are. A ‘technology’ is something that doesn’t work yet.
Connected Experience Technology Leader at GE Global Research
Arnie has over 30 years of experience in HCI Research and Practice. He's an expert across the User Experience Field and in Emerging Technologies and a Recognized Leader in HCI. Arnie filed and granted 29 patents and produced over 80 publications and presentations.
He's a successful manager, researcher and designer, teacher and mentor. Research Areas: Innovation methods, metrics that predict product success and technology diffusion, natural interaction, collaboration, decision making, adaptive ubiquitous computing, and R&D Management
Mike Kuniavsky designs the user experience of consumer-facing connected devices (The Internet of Things, ubiquitous computing, etc.) and the strategy around bringing such products to market.
He has significant experience in the UX of novel hardware devices, machine learning, manufacturing and printed electronics. His current focus is on designing multi-touchpoint services that include a variety of devices that which are brought together in unifying consumer-facing services that use predictive machine learning.
He is the author of two books on user experience design and research (Observing the User Experience: a practitioner's guide to user research and Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design). As a designer he has created and supervised the creation of successful and innovative user-centered digital technology–web sites, hardware products, services–for more than twenty years and for dozens of the world's biggest companies.
As a UX strategist and consultant, he has helped many organizations adopt processes that produce more user-centered, agile, profitable, and innovative products and services.
Alan has been a computer programmer since 1973 and an entrepreneur all of my life. He started my first company in 1976. He has also invented software for Bill Gates and helped to define the profession and practice of user experience design.
He is the author of The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, About Face, and its children, About Face 2.0 and About Face 3. He is also the founder of Cooper, a Bay Area interaction design and user experience consultancy.
Creative Good founder and CEO, "Customers Included," Good Todo, and Gel conference
I founded Creative Good in 1997 with a mission to improve the customer experience. Since then the Creative Good team has brought our strategy consulting to premier clients in media, finance, retail, consumer products, travel & hospitality, health care, automotive, information services, and other fields.
You can also watch videos from my Gel conferences (freely viewable on the Gel website), which over the years have debuted some of the most interesting and influential projects and people in the digital world – focused on user experience and digital experiences.
Eric's team shows you how to understand and apply key cultural factors to make sound design and content decisions. Avoiding digital stumbles helps you connect with people across different cultures.
As UX consultant, he draws on the testing and fieldwork in the U.S and abroad to show clients how to evaluate their online product offerings. The result? Products and services that reflect the target audience’s values. For example, while Americans tend to lament flashy ads and pop-ups, Mexican consumers often seek a deal and frequently comment on the absence of promotional offers. Their designs for a large Mexican bank reflected this preference and performed well during follow-up usability testing.
Usability Specialist/Accessibility SME at Ford Motor Company
Usability and accessibility professional with MSI from University of Michigan and MBA from Columbia University. Twelve-plus years performing and directing user testing, focus groups, competitive analysis, Section 508/WCAG evaluation, website remediation and accessibility policy.
Prior eighteen years directed consumer research, product management, brand strategy, competitive analysis and advertising programs for major advertising agencies and consumer products companies. Experience in education, health care, and corporate environments.
Jessica is the lead author and editor at Usability Lab, which provides you with the most up-to-date and hot topics surrounding the field of usability. Her blog is the start of a meaningful project where your thoughts and experience will be heard. She creates her blog with a view to providing a hub to unify the most valuable resources and connect you with the most popular influencers in the field.
Manager, Usability and UX Evangelism at Sabre Corporation
Brian Sullivan is the Manager of UX Operations at Sabre, where he oversees user research, UX training, usability, and recruiting. Brian is actively involved in the design and usability community–Founder of Big Design Conference, Chair of World Usability Day (2007-11), and President of DFW-UXPA (2006-present).
Brian has worked with AT&T, IBM, Burger King, American Airlines, SkyChefs, United Airlines, and Carter Blood Center.
Brian is publishing his first booked, The Design Studio Method (2015). Brian is also an internationally recognized speaker, which includes speaking engagements at SxSW, Big Design Conference, IA Summit, UXPA-I, User Friendly, CPSI, and UXPA Boston. Brian has written his first book, The Design Studio Method (Focal Press). He wrote the cover article for UX Magazine. Brian has been featured in Texas CEO Magazine, Big Design Magazine, uxmag, and more. He has created the UX Certification program at Southern Methodist University.
User Experience (UX) Design & Usability Research Consultant
Theo Mandel, Ph.D. is an international specialist in product user experience, usability strategy, user research, prototyping, design and usability testing. Dr. Mandel designs user-based products, websites and apps that meet client objectives and goals and are successful and enjoyable experiences for users.
Theo founded Interface Design and Development (IDD) in 1993 to provide comprehensive consulting, education, and seminars on software and Web user experience design and usability. Theo’s 20 years of experience in user interface design, user interface architecture and usability testing, has made him a well-know and well-respected consultant. Mandel has helped startups, companies and software developers review, design, and evaluate the user experience and usability of their products.
Senior Engineer, User Experience, Usability at Hyundai American Technical Center
Dave is a seasoned user experience consultant, manager, and practitioner. He designed user interfaces for commercial software, web sites, hand-helds, kiosks, automotive, and production machines and conducted evaluations in the lab, on the web, in the field, in cars, and in consumer homes.
Dave also led corporate initiatives to standardize user interfaces, improve usability, and achieve accessibility goals (e.g., Section 508 compliance). He's also a founder and program director of the Internet User Experience Conference, an annual conference since 2005.
Usability Program Manager at Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
Goal-oriented and effective leader in improving the user experience of websites, intranets, and mobile products at dozens of government agencies. Successful in identifying and improving design in early, middle and late-stage products.
Jonathan has a proven track record of training autonomous usability testing teams and creating environments where User-Centered Design is practiced. Clients include U.S. Army, NASA, Census, Dept. of Transportation, and the IRS.
Rahel is a results-driven, seasoned content strategy consultant with extensive experience in content strategy. She has a strong track record of delivering content strategies in the context of digital strategy projects, often in environments with complex content delivery requirements.
She's the professional who delivers the hard truths and sometimes difficult prescriptions that help organisations leverage their content as a business asset.
By inclination, training and experience, I am an information architect, user experience consultant, and content strategist working in Toronto, Canada.
I help people create useful and usable information spaces and interactive tools. I develop strategy, conduct research, organize information, shape interfaces, and structure content. I work with large and small organizations, in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors.
Collaborating with staff and stakeholders, I focus on encouraging participation, enhancing communication, and delivering strategic value.
I'm a UX/product designer who nerds out on designing best-of-class products and experiences, generally with startups or on new products. I love the challenge of building a team and creating culture of good design — both process and product — and seek out the people and companies who help make that happen.
Dana is an independent usability consultant and user researcher who founded UsabilityWorks in San Francisco, CA. She has been doing user research in one form or another since 1982. Dana took part in her first usability test 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.
At nForm I collaborate with our team to develop strategies for improving our clients' digital products and services. I'm also involved in user research projects, where I focus on developing innovative approaches to discovering user needs (see my presentation on User Research Hacks below). I consult on our web and I.T. governance projects as well.
In my spare time, I manage the business. I also led the web team at the Capital Health and was responsible for improving the effectiveness of the website and Intranet for that organization's 20,000 employees and one million users. Key accomplishments include conducting the first usability tests, establishing a sustainable web governance framework, and initiating a major redesign.
I am currently a Senior Interactive Architect at Blink Interactive Architects, a Seattle-based user experience consulting firm. My academic background includes Master’s degrees in Technical Communication and Business Administration, both from the University of Washington.
My professional experience includes over 15 years in the software /web development industries, working with clients such as Apple Computer, AT&T Wireless, Lexis-Nexis, Microsoft and RealNetworks.
A customer-centred designer and consultant with over 20 years experience making structured use of customer insights to inform business problems, drive business value and deliver great customer experiences across a range of channels.
With a background in digital channels, I have spent the last five years conceptualising and delivering joined-up cross-channel service experiences for a range of industries including finance, telecommunications, education and media. I am one of the founding partners of Meld Studios, an interaction and service design consultancy based in Sydney.
At Brightpearl Jon led UX strategy across the product by defining the product roadmap for the Brightpearl platform. He also was responsible for developing and implementing company-wide go-to-market plans for new features and strategic integration's.
He was also a leader of a cross-functional team using SCRUM to deliver software every two weeks. Jon is the creator of bagelhint.com – a website which provides people with feedback on the designs and usability of their websites (by humans, not computers).
User experience specialist who helps companies identify UI (user interface) related requirements and create detailed product specifications—helping them create more useful and usable products, reduce development costs, and decrease time to market.
Experienced in doing end-to-end user-centered design, from conducting ethnographic research on potential users, through defining detailed designs, to conducting formative and summative usability testing to refine and validate products before release to market.
Expert in setting up user-centered design processes as an integral part of both hardware and software product development. Contributor to international standards related to usability testing processes.
I am a design leader, practitioner and mentor. I am passionate about improving the experience for the user as well as the team creating the next big thing. To me, it's always about the people.
My journey includes working for the largest company in America, spirited Silicon Valley startups, and an agency voted "Digital Agency of the Decade". My contributions include establishing UX design and research practices (twice) and improving the design of hundreds of projects over the years. I think the new frontier for UX is to design the organization that supports it.
Founding Principal, User Experience Design Consultant at Usable Interface
A recognized leader in the industry, Kyle has spent the last 15 years helping create intuitive interfaces for a variety of different products. She is a prolific writer, having numerous articles published in industry trade magazines, and a popular speaker with recent appearances at Big Design, CHI, IA Summit, SxSW, UXPA, WritersUA, and Web 2.0 Expo.
Kyle has helped major fortune 500 companies design usable interfaces for their products. Her clients have ranged in industries from pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer to publishing powerhouses like McGraw-Hill.
Kyle is the Founder and Past President of the New Hampshire Chapter of the User Experience Professionals' Association (NH UXPA), she has served as the Chair of PhillyCHI, the Philadelphia Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI), and she served as the New Hampshire Ambassador for the User Experience Network (UXnet). She is very passionate about the continued growth of the usability and user experience design community.
Lyle is a principal consultant at Vivid Mojo where he helps create great products and web sites through the company's design services, usability testing and user research. We know what it takes to create a great user experience to connect with and delight your customers.
Need a more effective web site? Have a product that's getting lack-luster customer feedback? Is your app not delivering the business results you want? We can help with those problems and more. The clients of Vivid Mojo are businesses and associations located around the world. They're experienced in many industries: from Health Care to Financial Services, eCommerce to Energy, Insurance to Agriculture and more.
Experience Design Professional Information and User Experience Architect
Marina is well versed with all the phases of User Experience design such as requirements gathering, defining site architecture, developing user workflows and wireframes, front-end design and development and usability testing. Specialties: User experience design in the web and mobile space, including Android, information architecture, usability and research.
As an Experience Design Director Olga works with executives and technical architects to create delightful user experiences. She has over seventeen years experience helping product owners and teams with innovation research, defining product strategy, planning and execution of product strategy, and product definition.
In her last assignment Olga was Director of UX at Apollo Matrix where she helped guide the team in all matters of UX. Previous to that Olga was UX Lead at Three Pillar Global where she helped guide the UX team in strategy, information architecture, and interaction design. She helped define AARPs travel toolkit, Health Prime International’s medical mobile apps, GHS’s communication mobile app, and the Wireless Matrix fleet mobile app.
I’m a programmer and art school dropout, currently living in Munich, Germany and working in the Communications Design Group. Previously, I worked at Google as a software engineer on Chrome and Android, and at BumpTop as a programmer and interaction designer.
I have a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, where I studied human-computer interaction in the DGP lab under the supervision of Prof. Ravin Balakrishnan. My research on how people use tabs in web browsers was published at CHI 2010. Before moving to Toronto, I worked at the IBM Ottawa Lab (formerly OTI) on the J9 Java Virtual Machine, in the areas of memory management and Real-time Java. As a co-op student at OTI, I also worked on SWT, the toolkit for Eclipse.
Director at Accreda Ltd.; Founder of UsabilityGeek.com
I am a web usability / user experience (UX) consultant operating from Malta, Europe. I offer specialized consultancy services that includes user research, user/task analysis, user interface design, iterative prototyping, heuristic reviews, interface guidelines development, and iterative usability testing.
Being also a Marketing graduate and holding various web marketing roles within a varied portfolio of industries has helped me acquire extensive marketing and client management experience. In addition to this, I have held user interface / UX design roles and am very proficient in hand coding of standards-compliant HTML and CSS. I have also designed and developed a number of web sites as a freelancer and in conjunction with leading web development companies.
I also run my own Web Site Usability blog – Usability Geek, where I evangelize about the importance of web site usability and provide practical recommendations for the development of usable web sites.
Specialties: User Experience (UX), Usability, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), User Interface Design (UI), Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Online Marketing, HTML, CSS and Web Design
I've been working in the Internet environment for over fifteen years – at first as a freelancer and since 2009 at a corporate level as Usability Designer of new functionalities and sites based on the User Center Design.
I am the author of 250 small and medium designs and several user research projects. In my work, I use Axure RP – an advanced, deep clickable prototyping application – supported by a sheet of paper and a pen – useful for impulsive designing. Privately, I play webdeveloper, graphic designer and photographer.
Accomplished designer and UX leader with a track record for building innovative teams, identifying new product opportunities, and launching successful mobile-first solutions in enterprise, advertising, and consumer products reaching hundreds of millions of users around the world.
I have a passion for design excellence and solutions that tap into the social graph to connect people with experiences, people, and products they love.
I quickly see through complex problems, thrive on working collaboratively to lead teams towards optimal solutions and produce beautiful pixel-perfect solutions for a wide range of platforms and devices.
Tectonic is a user experience design firm founded by Bill Flora and the team that created the Microsoft visual language Metro and helped share the vision throughout Microsoft.
At tectonic, we love to bring brands to life through next generation software design.
And because we already work with some of the biggest global brands in entertainment and technology today, we know what it takes to deliver exceptionally effective and delightful experiences to millions.
Executive Director, Global Head of User Experience & Design at Morgan Stanley
I have been building and leading Design Teams in the Design and IT industries for over 15 years focusing particularly on multi-channel Customer Experience design and strategy for enterprise IT applications, websites, e-commerce. I specialise in applying User-Centred Design and Research techniques to develop innovative solutions which deliver tangible business benefit and customer satisfaction.
Head of Product, Exec. Director of the UXies, UX & PM Teacher & Consultant
Experienced, interdisciplinary, energetic technology product executive with strengths spanning strategy, full lifecycle product development, general management and operations, UX, creative direction & content.
I like to organize and manage chaos, create and optimize products and processes, and I love teaching, leading, mentoring and inspiring others.
I'm an evangelist for user-centered design and truly lean software development that incorporates rapid prototyping, audience research, analytics and feedback into every stage of software development.
I relish making digital products easy, impactful and efficient; working with nice, smart, engaged colleagues; and getting things done. I'm also a triple US- UK- CAN citizen.
As a professor who practices what he preaches, Amos has over 20 years' experience building things, both practical and whimsical. His most rewarding professional validation to date was standing on a crowded NYC subway surreptitiously looking down at a seated passenger reading a Metro newspaper article about himself and his work.
That happened only once, though Amos has been responsible for the strategy and design of dozens of popular apps, websites, and advertising campaigns on behalf of a wide range of clients, from the UN to Facebook and Microsoft, from Amex to Juicy Couture, from MTV to Amazon, and on to small tech startups whose names are rightly forgotten to history.
His own award-winning non-commercial work has been featured in Forbes, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Wired, etc, etc.
Amos holds a Master's from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and a Bachelor's in Brain & Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester.
Associate Professor of Media Design, Parsons School of Design
As Associate Professor of Media Design, and former director of the MFA Design and Technology graduate program at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City (2010-2013), David Carroll’s teaching and research explores how an art and design studio practice intersects with new technologies, evolving media ecologies, the media industry, public policy, education and pedagogy.
NYC Media Lab, Pearson Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Education, and Nokia Research Center have funded his research. Prior to his academic career, he served industry clients including AOL, A&E, CNN, ESPN, FOX, HBO, PBS, Random House, Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, Sony, Time Inc., Warner Bros and others. Professor Carroll earned his MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design in 2000 and his BA in Art History and Religion from Bowdoin College in 1997. – By User Experience Awards
Feliphe Lavor joins Huge as Experience Director in Brooklyn. Originally from Brazil, Feliphe has worked across multiple departments at Huge’s office in Rio, including interaction design, strategy, and user experience, trying to find the sweet spot between engineering and design for clients.
He has led projects for global companies such as Google, Coke, Discovery Networks, Universal Music and Estadão.
Prior to joining Huge, Feliphe was a business consultant, and has lived and worked in India, the UK, Latin America, and the United States. Feliphe earned a B.Eng. in Industrial Engineering from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, a Post-Graduate degree in Cognitive Ergonomics from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and an MBA from IBMEC in Brazil. – By User Experience Awards
Director, UX Strategy and Design, GWIM at Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Creative user experience, strategy and technology leader with 16 years experience and a passion for innovative technologies.
Demonstrated success in applying a holistic approach to user-centered design and developing strategic roadmaps for digital experiences.
Experienced manager, adept at building teams that specialize in both strategic and production design. Has managed both in-house teams as well as numerous engagements with top digital and interactive agencies. – By User Experience Awards
As the Head of Experience Design at Airbnb, Katie leads the designers defining Airbnb’s digital products and services.
Katie is helping the team craft high-quality experiences in the online and offline worlds. Katie joined Airbnb from Greenstart Venture Design where, as a Partner and Creative Director, she worked with early stage startups to design their user experience and brand strategy. Prior to Greenstart, as Creative Director at frog design, Katie led strategic, multidisciplinary design programs for companies including Intel, Disney, Samsung, Dolby and Chase Bank. Katie’s expertise includes interaction and industrial design, business strategy and user research.
Katie studied Industrial Design at Art Center College of Design and taught Interaction and Industrial Design at California College of Art’s graduate design program for three years.
LukeW is an internationally recognized digital product leader who has designed and built software used by over a billion people worldwide.
Luke is currently a Product Director at Google. Earlier he was the CEO and Co-founder of Polar (acquired by Google in 2014) and the Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Bagcheck (acquired by Twitter in 2011).
Prior to founding start-ups, Luke was an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital, the Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo!, Lead User Interface Designer at eBay, and a Senior Interface Designer at NCSA: the birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.
Luke is the author of three popular Web design books (Mobile First, Web Form Design & Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability) in addition to many articles about digital product design and strategy. He is also a consistently top-rated speaker at conferences and companies around the world, and a Co-founder and former Board member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).
Luke also founded LukeW Ideation & Design, a product strategy and design consultancy, and taught graduate interface design courses at the University of Illinois.
Jared M. Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering and a co-founder of Center Centre.
If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about user experience design, 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 experience design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.
Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the User Interface Engineering, 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.
With Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, he is starting a new school in Chattanooga, TN, to create the next generation of industry-ready UX Designers. In 2014, the school, under the nickname of the Unicorn Institute, launched a Kickstarter project that successfully raised more that 600% of its initial goal.
He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual UI Conference and UX Immersion Conference, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is author of the book Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide and co-author of Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work. You can find his writing at uie.com and follow his adventures on the twitters at @jmspool.
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Dr. Nielsen established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.
Director, Design Lab at University of California, San Diego
Don Norman is Director of The Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego. He is cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, IDEO fellow, and former Vice President of Apple. He serves on numerous boards, helping companies make products enjoyable, understandable, and profitable. His books include Emotional Design and the Design of Everyday Things: more at www.jnd.org
Jeff is a Six-Sigma trained statistical analyst and pioneer in quantifying the user experience. He specializes in making statistical concepts understandable and actionable. He is the author of five books, including Customer Analytics for Dummies and Quantifying the User Experience.
Jeff has published over twenty peer-reviewed research articles and presents tutorials and papers regularly at the leading Human Computer Interaction conferences: CHI, UPA and HCII and HFES. He has worked for Oracle, PeopleSoft, Intuit and General Electric. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Denver and leads an annual UX Boot Camp focusing on UX Methods and Metrics.
Jeff is completing his PhD in Research Methods & Statistics at the University of Denver (expected Spring 2016). He received his Masters in Learning, Design and Technology from Stanford University with a concentration in statistical concepts. Prior to Stanford, he received his B.S. in Information Management & Technology and BS in Television, Radio and Film from Syracuse University. While at Syracuse he completed a two-year thesis study on web-usability.
Torsten is CEO and founder of Userpeek. He is an old stager in the online business with 20 years of experience as an online marketer, conversion rate optimizer and UX strategist.
