Authors

Alison Lawrence is the UX Design and Technology liaison at Didus, a niche career services agency focused on experience design, technology, research, and strategy. She has been navigating the murky waters of the employment market for over ten years. She helps candidates to make the most of the interview process, and to negotiate an offer that both parties feel great about. She is also a contributor to UX Magazine.

Amanda Stockwell is President of Stockwell Strategy, a UX research practice focused on lean research methods and integrating user knowledge with business goals to create holistic product strategies. She has spent most of the last decade focused on finding innovative ways to understand end users and embed that knowledge into overall process. She's lead teams that provide research, design, and UX strategy services and frequently writes and speaks about her experience.

Amir is an Industrial Designer with over 14 years experience in the design and UX space. He has instructed a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on UX through Open2Study and believes there is nothing quite like a great user experience.

Andrew is the CEO at Optimal Workshop, a suite of user research tools designed to help designers and information architects improve the user experience of their products. He’s a big advocate for creating better and more meaningful experiences for all, and channels that mantra through his work at Optimal Workshop. Aside from UX-related things, Andrew has a love for dabbling with inventions.

UX Designer and CEO of Clearleft, Andy curates the Leading Design and UX London conferences and helped set-up The Brighton Digital Festival. Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like SXSW, An Event Apart and The Next Web. Never happier than when he's diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified dive instructor and retired shark wrangler.

Andy Vitale is the UX Director, Wholesale Banking at SunTrust Bank, one of the nation’s largest financial services companies, where he is focused on translating human insights into actionable experiences to improve the product and service ecosystem within the finance industry. Andy is responsible for leading all user experience efforts for SunTrust’s wholesale baking solutions, advancing design strategies and driving design awareness as a critical function for competitive advantage and market differentiation.

Andy holds a Master’s Degree in User Experience Design and has previously held multiple roles as a designer, entrepreneur, education department chair, and design leader. With a proven ability to lead change and process improvements, Andy has developed strategies and design solutions for multiple industries within diverse organizations ranging from startups to Fortune ranked companies. He is a relentless user experience evangelist, with a passion for cognitive thinking and humanizing technology, driven by a user-centered passion that takes cross-functional teams, and their products, from good to great.

Angela is the Founding Principal at Normal Modes UX & Usability, a Texas-based company that specializes in user research, usability testing and user-centered design training.

She’s also the Executive Director of the Houston chapter of the User Experience Professionals’ Association (UXPA.)  Angela loves creating applications to automate truly atrocious manual processes (her kryptonite), watching people interact with the world around them, building great project teams, and cooking.  She lives with her husband and two children in Houston, the most diverse city in the United States.  You should visit sometime – it's not what you're expecting.

As a director, designer and candlestick maker for Handmade Web, Anthony builds corporate identities, websites, consults on SEO and social marketing for small businesses. Freelancing as Anthony Colfelt for larger corporates, he researches customers, runs innovation workshops and designs all manner of service touchpoints – digital and physical. He has spoken at conferences and written articles about user-centred-design for anybody who will listen since 2000.

Ashlea McKay is a Senior User Experience (UX) writer, researcher and keynote speaker with a background in industrial design. Ashlea is also Autistic and has held state and national level volunteer leadership positions in the Diversity & Inclusion space. Ashlea is the Chief Columnist and Co-Founder of UX advice column, UX Agony Aunt which can be viewed on the Optimal Workshop blog. A well respected UX thought leader, she is passionate about mentoring and is heavily involved in the global UX community. Ashlea is currently writing a book about her experiences and ideas as an Autistic UX professional. Based in Canberra Australia, Ashlea is an art and craft obsessed cat lady with a love of vintage fashion who missed her calling as a hairdresser, and can be found on Twitter.

Audrey is a Partner at DesignMap, a B2B-focused software design firm in San Francisco. She has been lucky enough to be surrounded by supportive and understanding colleagues throughout her 8 years there, and before that at DesignMap, Dubberly Design Office, and Netscape. She's also very lucky to be mom of three beautiful girls. She was thrilled to first share a presentation related to this story at the Rosenfeld EUX, with coaching from Dan Willis.

Ben Rowe is a UX Designer and Product thinker based in Melbourne. A marketer by trade, Ben moved into UX design almost ten years ago. He's helped improve the experiences of a wide range of digital projects and products. Ben has worked for large corporates, small startups and everything in between.
 
Ben lives in Kyneton in central Victoria, Australia, and is expecting to have a mid-life crisis any day now.
 

Ben Sauer has an English degree, but don't hold that against him. He specialises in research and product strategy for companies large and small across the world, including the BBC, Penguin Random House, and also mentors startups. Organisations hire Ben to upgrade their design skills and design culture, so running workshops is his bread and butter. Recently he’s been writing about voice interfaces and speaking on the subject with audiences across Europe.

Ben Tollady is co-founder and UX Director at Thirst Studios, a small close-knit user experience & web design team based in Melbourne, Australia. He’s worked in the field of user experience and interaction design for over a decade in both the UK and Australia.

Don't get him started about his background in industrial design & technology though; he'll bore you for hours about how it translates directly to the discipline of interaction design for the web.

I work as  UX Researcher & Designer at Userspots, an experience design agency based in İstanbul, Turkey.  I also facilitate and mentor university students and other young people in user research and product design. I love sharing what I know, and learning things that I don’t know. I believe sharing knowledge is the key to being successful, and enjoy incorporating the things I learn into my life—not just as professional development, but also personally.

Brad is an award-winning web designer, best known for his comics in .Net magazine and “The Brads”, a weekly strip found on his personal website. His work has appeared on the New York Time's website, CNET, Smashing Magazine and elsewhere.

Cam Rogers has grown up with a love a comics and graphic novels. As a kid he especially loved Popeye the Sailor man. He loved how Popeye used his superhuman strength (derived from eating spinach) to defend his sweetheart Olive from the black-bearded bully, Brutus. So inspired was he, that he has become the UX equivalent of Popeye: using his superdesign strength (derived from feeling empathy) to defend his sweetheart users from dark-patterned interaction paradigms everywhere! He has even grown up to look remarkably like Popeye, minus the tats!

Cathy Wang is an independent designer and digital strategist. Former Vancouverite, now a nomadic world explorer, she writes about service design and experience strategy, with a focus on human emotion.  

Cathy has a deep love for connecting businesses to people. She dreams about the future and how design can change the world. Secretly, Cathy is a gynoid.

Cheryl is a Product Designer with a passion for human behaviour. She loves finding new ways of applying her psychology background to her design work, so that she can create products people love. Cheryl works with companies that are customer focused and committed to positive social impact.

Chris is the Director and Principal Consultant of Nomat, a UX research and strategy firm. With almost 15 years experience he brings a pragmatic and sensible approach to UX that delivers improved ROI from design. Away from UX, Chris chases his little monkeys around and gets out on his pushy.

Chris is a Design Fellow at Cooper, keeper of scifiinterfaces.com, co-author of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction & About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Edition.

Chris Offutt is a writer, UX designer and broadcast television professional living in Los Angeles.  She keeps company with a dog named Silly Billy and maintains a database of terrible puns with which to torture her friends and family.

Christine is the UX Lead of UXMNL, one of the first UX agencies in the Philippines. She is also the Co-Founder of UXPH and the Interaction Design Foundation Country Manager of the Philippines. Although she may be young, her passion for UX and determination to put humanity back into businesses inspires clients and other individuals to instill the UX mindset in their work ethics.

Coburn is a UX Director at Magento, part of eBay Enterprise. He has a commitment to building systems that perform, objects that inspire, and ultimately… a world that works for everyone.

After a few years as a propmaster in TV & films, he managed to get out of the film business and into software development in 1998. His career in User Experience design is now his passion. He has also written a different vision of the afterlife in a fiction novel called The Middle Man.

Cory Lebson, author of The UX Careers Handbook, has been a user experience consultant for over 20 years. He is Principal and Owner of Lebsontech LLC, a successful consulting firm focused on user research and evaluation, user experience strategy, UX training, and mentoring.  Cory also speaks and writes frequently on topics related to UX careers and practice, and is a past president of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) International and of the UXPA DC Chapter.

As Creative Director for UX architecture (UXA) at the BBC, Dan leads a team of IA specialists. He’s responsible for defining the professional practice of UXA at the BBC and ensuring that the organisation is creating information architecture that delivers the best possible experiences to its editors and audiences. Dan has previously worked for agencies and ran a theatre company. He now designs labels, vocabularies, URLs, navigation, strategies and processes. He lives just outside Sheffield (UK) with a wife, a child and a cat called Rosa.

Dan is a co-founder and principal at Apogee and co-founder of Make Meaningful Work, as well as the co-founder of UX Hong Kong.

He has been involved in the UX field for over 20 years, and has been based in Hong Kong for over 20 years. Dan has lectured about user-centered design globally. He has co-authored two books including Global UX with Whitney Quesenbery and the Usability Kit with Gerry Gaffney. 

David is a UX designer and digital strategist with 20 years experience in UK and Australia.  In recent years he's been contributing to, and learning from, some of Melbourne's best digital teams.

His brain is hardwired to unpick and redesign customer experiences, so if he’s distracted whilst you’re out for a drink… he’ll be redesigning the bar.

I am a junior UX designer, self-taught and—as of writing—unemployed. I come from Denmark, a small and cold country in the northern part of Europe referred to as Scandinavia. Aside from design, I am obsessed with food, movies and rock climbing.

Dr. David Travis holds a BSc and a PhD in Psychology. He works as a Chartered Psychologist at the User Experience Consulting & UX Training company Userfocus. David has worked in the fields of human factors, usability and user experience since 1989, and has published two books on usability.

Derek Featherstone is an internationally-known speaker and authority on accessibility and web design. He spends his time as the lead of Simply Accessible, based in Ottawa, Canada. The team works with Fortune 500 corporations, educational institutions, public utilities, government agencies and other private sector clients.

Derek always puts the user first, and strives to make the web a better place by designing experiences that are easy to use for everyone, including people with disabilities. He speaks at conferences around the world, where he combines his teaching background and nearly 14 years of design and development to engage, educate and entertain.

My name is Dimitris Stathis, I studied architecture, but have always been interested in the general design of products that really help people. Like the Delorean in order to travel to the future. But since someone got me on that, the next best thing was UX, in which I am constantly involved through studying, side projects, co-organizing of the Thessaloniki UX Meetup and attending UX conventions and workshops. All this works like the Delorean. Gives me the best from the present in order to be able to see the future. And that’s UX. Because, after all, if you’re going to build a time machine, why not do it with some style?

Donna is a Lead Consultant at Readify where she's building a new design practice and working on interesting client projects. With 20-ish years experience, she has designed for a wide range of problems across all kinds of industries. Recognised internationally as a leading UX practitioner, Donna is a regular conference speaker, has written three books: on information architecture, card sorting and writing for the web. She created and ran UX Australia for 9 years.

Doug Collins is a Denver-based UX Engineer who volunteers part-time at the North Pole in their “Strange Wish” department, helping to grant the odd requests kids make to Santa each year.  In years past, he has hand-delivered a gallon of pickles, a live cobra, and a gumball machine full of avocados to hopeful children around the world.

When he’s not working with Santa to legally change children’s names to “Batman” or raising unicorns that vomit rainbows, he’s an occasional guest contributor to UX Mastery, full-time father to an amazing son, and husband to a wonderful woman.

Dylan Wilbanks is a Seattle-based web roustabout, raconteur, and curmudgeon currently practicing as design lead for EnergySavvy. He’s spent over 15 years designing, building, and perfecting online experiences, and every once in a while does a good job. Occasionally, he speaks at conferences.

Eleanor McKenna is an Irish Interaction Designer who loves Christmas films. She is currently based in Munich and works at Google.

She started out almost a decade ago as a front-end developer before making the transition into design, and loves to share what she has learned on her design blog.

Elise Margetts is a consultant at the U1 Group (an Experience Research and Strategy consultancy). She is a total research nerd, getting her PhD in social/research psychology, and had worked in the market and social research industry for 5 years before discovering the wonderful world of UX. She loves qualitative research but also revels in any opportunity to design surveys and run some statistics (particularly inferential statistics)! She has a canine sidekick called Jones who follows her around wherever she goes. In her downtime, Elise likes to play basketball and (as evidenced by this article) bake!

Dr Elizabeth Churchill is a Director of User Experience at Google. For 2 decades, Elizabeth has led human centered technology R&D in Silicon Valley organizations, including Fuji Xerox’s research lab (FXPAL), the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), eBay Research Labs, and Yahoo! She is the current Secretary/Treasurer of the ACM, an ACM Distinguished Scientist and Speaker, and a member of the ACM's SIGCHI Academy. She recently was awarded the CITRIS Athena Award for Executive Leadership.

Eric A. Meyer (@meyerweb) is an internationally-recognized author, speaker, blogger, and sometime teacher and consultant. He is currently technical lead at Rebecca’s Gift and co-founder of An Event Apart with Jeffrey Zeldman. In his most recent book, Design for Real Life, Eric and his co-author Sara Wachter-Boettcher teach how to design with not just empathy, but compassion. He’s been working on the Web since 1993 and still finds it deeply compelling.

Gareth is a senior UX consultant at Thirst Studios in Melbourne. With over six years experience in the field both locally and in the USA across a wide range of digital products, he is a passionate user advocate and is driven to craft engaging and delightful experiences for his clients and their users.

Gerry Gaffney runs UX consultancy Information & Design in Melbourne, Australia and the User Experience podcast at uxpod.com. Although he’s passionate about user-centred design, he secretly yearns for the day when we can hook up all the machines and eliminate the intermediary.

Gina Ellis has a secret past as an industrial designer, but got sucked into the vortex of shopping mall design and delivery for many years. She’s currently working in the banking sector where she’s walking the fine line between digital transformation and bricks-and-mortar design and implementation.

Hira works in the Digital Operations department at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), as a Usability Specialist. Her work involves UX research for various digital products offered by the CBC. She also teaches User Experience Design for University of Waterloo's Global Business and Digital Arts program. Her areas of interest include gamification, digital memory and online communities.

Indi Young is a freelance problem-space researcher and empathy coach in the technology world. She helps organizations understand the people they support as humans, not just as “users.” She was co-founder of the UX agency Adaptive Path. She has authored two books, Mental Models and Practical Empathy, posts as @indiyoung on Medium and Twitter, and does newsletters and posts via her website www.indiyoung.com

Senior UX at Thirst Studios, I'm a Facilitator, Doodler and Doer of things. Learning and teaching obsessed. I'm constantly curious about what I don't know and have a tendency to flip what I do know.

I speak the language of the designer, manager, employee, customer, geek, sales person, trainer, marketer, or business owner. People are my people! I also love tech, especially when it helps people.

Our studio dog, Chloe comes home with me in a bag. She loves it, I swear.

James is a creative leader for digital, and design experience space. He's helped re-define, create and influence positive outcomes around the world, including Europe, USA and Australia for over 20 years. He Co-created Carter Digital, recently named one of Asia Pacific’s top innovative experience agencies, renowned for their passion, and evolving user and people experiences beyond the screen. His experience and knowledge propelled him to Cannes Lion, becoming Australia's first Judge for Digital Craft in 2016. An IADAS, Adfest and Webby’s Judge in VR, Mobile, Apps, Podcast and User Experience. 

James is an advisor, teacher of user experience and digital technologies, a regular presenter, creator and speaker, discussing digital landscapes, technology trends, and the profound impact design has on humanity.

Jared M. Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering, the largest usability research organisation 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.

Jeff is the founding principal of Measuring Usability LLC, a usability and quantitative research firm in Denver, CO. He is author of over twenty journal articles and four books, including Quantifying the User Experience. Jeff has a masters from Stanford University and is a PhD candidate in Research Methods & Statistics at the University of Denver.

Jessica Enders has suffered from a life-long condition known as a love of designing forms, transactional applications and other interfaces for collecting information. She is attempting to minimise the adverse symptoms by running her own form consultancy business, Formulate Information Design.

Jim Ross is a Principal UX Architect at Infragistics. He has spent most of the 21st Century researching and designing intuitive and satisfying user experiences. As a UX consultant, he has created web sites, mobile apps, intranets, web applications, software, and business applications for financial, pharmaceutical, medical, entertainment, retail, technology, and government clients. He has a Masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction from DePaul University, is a frequent speaker at UX conferences, and is a prolific author for UX magazines and blogs, including his Practical Usability column in UXmatters.

Despite starting life as an organisational psychologist, Jodie finally found her vocation in  the technology world during the dot.com boom 20 years ago. Since then, she has written a book (‘Killer UX Design’); created a world-leading Cooking app that’s rivalled Jamie and Nigella’s offerings (downloaded 1.5M times and counting); and founded and sold one of the largest and best known UX consultancies in Australia. What a ride! Free again, Jodie is now back doing what she loves, with people she likes to hang out with. She divides her time between Sydney and Byron Bay, where you’ll find her jogging to the lighthouse, or to Shelly Beach; or hanging out with her kids, her cat and dog… or cooking! With any spare time that remains 😊

Joe Natoli has been preaching and practicing the gospel of User Experience to Fortune 100, 500 and Government organizations for nearly three decades. He is immensely passionate about the inherent power of UX and design and devotes half of his practice to writing, coaching, and speaking. The remaining half of Joe’s practice is dedicated to training Enterprise Design and Development teams, helping them integrate best practices in UX into their product development efforts. He has launched two successful online courses with Udemy, and his latest book on UX strategy and product improvement, Think First, was published worldwide on October 5, 2015.

Jo grew up in multicultural Hong Kong, with a Chinese-Burmese father and Chinese-Indonesian mother. She collaborates with global teams conducting research in Cantonese, Mandarin and English.

Jo is passionate about the environment, political and economic systems and how we can live healthier and happier lives while not adversely impacting less fortunate people. She is a co-founder of Apogee, the co-founder of UX Hong Kong and Make Meaningful Work.

Julia is currently a UX Program Director at GrowthX Academy in San Francisco, CA. In the past, she has been a UX Designer and Manager for academic institutions, enterprise corporations, and smaller companies. With almost two decades of industry experience as a UX Designer for companies such as Dell, VMWare, and TripIt; and agencies like Epsilon, Razorfish, SapientNitro, and MRM McCann, Julia is known for her UX mentorship and career guidance, and her ability to enhance the culture and morale of any team she leads. She is a passionate advocate for User Experience and for education.

Kathryn Reeves is a Writer & Content Strategist for Optimal Workshop. Optimal Workshop builds remote usability testing tools that enable UX designers and researchers to make evidence­-based design decisions. 

Kayla is a user and experiencer of products, frustrated with mediocrity and passionate advocate for the voice of all users. Kayla is a UX designer at SEEK and also undertaking a PhD in Interaction Design looking at digital insertables. In her spare time… she doesn’t have any.

Ketut is the founder and principal consultant at Somia Customer Experience, based in Indonesia. Sulis has over 10 years experience in design research, user experience design, and training. Prior to founding Somia, she spent 12 years in Singapore where she worked as Senior UX Designer at Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Reading Room. She holds a bachelor degree in product design and a PhD in Human Factors at Nanyang Technological University. Sulis loves nature and beach (which is why she is now living in Bali) and wants to bring humanity and meaning back into business.

Kim Chatterjee is a User Experience designer at Stamford Interactive with a background in development communication. She is constantly on the lookout for ways to improve lives and has an addiction to stories, other people's projects, and acquiring new skills even though she knows she'll probably suck at them. This time it's roller skating and thankfully she's getting better at it.

Kim Goodwin is the bestselling author of Designing for the Digital Age. She has spent over 20 years in UX, both consulting and in-house. She helps organizations build their internal design capabilities through coaching and organizational change management. Previously, Kim was VP of Design & General Manager at Cooper, a leading design and strategy agency in San Francisco. She was also VP of Product and User Experience at PatientsLikeMe, where she guided designers and PMs in combining a patient support network with a medical research platform. She now speaks and teaches regularly at UX conferences around the world. Kim is based near San Francisco, but often in another time zone; whether herding cats in a conference room or photographing wildlife in places with no Internet access.

I'm a UX/UI Designer at Magnet 360, a Salesforce consulting and implementation agency. I've earned a couple Salesforce certifications in the process. I have a varied background consisting of User Experience Design, Visual Design, and Marketing. Designing for the modern day end-user is exciting; technology is present in everyday life, but the challenges and needs for it are rapidly evolving. I'm passionate about adapting to these changes and designing the best solutions. Outside of work, my life revolves around weightlifting, martial arts, cooking, my cat Mona, video games, and any random DIY projects that I can get my hands on.

Kristy is a lively UX professional from Detroit with great strength in digital strategy. She is inquisitive and passionate about human interaction – and knows to look beyond data to provide the best insight possible. Having completed studies in engineering, design and anthropology, Kristy has an outstanding ability to ‘design the right thing’, not just ‘design the thing right’. She works for user experience consultancy U1 Group in Melbourne.

Kyle is a reformed midwesterner living on Long Island. Last year, he founded SuperHelpful, a design consultancy that helps nonprofits realize the economic benefits of user-centric, evidence-based content development. Kyle writes letters about design research twice a week. Last week, someone unsubscribed when he sent out a parody of a Tina Turner song about Google Analytics.

Leigh Gamon is an Interaction Designer working in the Experience Design team at advertising agency CHE Proximity. She has a background in visual media and graphic design. From her teenage desire to work in film and build beautiful emotive narratives she’s now found herself doing a variation of that in the digital space. She’s still fairly new and fresh to the industry, working it out along the way and loving every moment of it. 

Lis Hubert is an independent information architecture consultant whose present and past clients include MLB Advanced Media, ESPN Mobile, and Viacom Media Networks. Former Chief Experience Officer for 8coupons.com — she has spoken at conferences around the world, and is also a frequent contributor to the UX community’s knowledge base, writing for publications such as UX Matters and teaching industry classes for resources such as TeamTreehouse.com.

In Lis’ latest project, the Adrift on Purpose Podcast, she works to explore what it takes to live a life of choice versus a life of obligation. You can find out more about Lis at www.elisabethhubert.com.

General tinkerer, web tailor, user-centred design soldier and tall-ship sailor, Luke Chambers is a proud co-founder and Producer of this here UXmas.com, and also of UX Mastery, an online training resource with tips, tools and training for aspiring UX designers. Throughout his day he listens, sketches, tells stories and explains to people the 'why' of the design that happens behind the visuals. 

Luke is a user experience consultant and a craft beer aficionado. He has almost ten years of experience creating digital stuff. Luke loves it when technology enriches people's lives, especially if he has helped to make it. In his spare time, he brews beer, facilitates a UX bookclub, has a poorly maintained alter ego and once made a website about himself.

Lynn is a veteran product and customer experience leader. She has spent 16+ years developing strategic user experience practices at some of the world’s largest agencies. Lynn’s leadership roles have enabled her to morph in-house capabilities and service offerings to clients in lockstep with market demands.

As former Chief Experience Officer at McCann Erickson, Lynn helped transform traditional advertising for the agency by introducing Design Thinking approaches to consumer research, innovation, and cross-domain ideation.

She is a mentor in the NY startup community, external thesis advisor at Detroit's College for Creative Studies and an active public speaker. She holds an MA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Mary Shaw is a UX design consultant and mentor with over 20 years' experience in digital design. She’s worked on hundreds of web projects for a variety of Fortune 500 companies and startups. Mary helps big and small companies get the most from their online investments by designing with intent and focusing on results. She also helps aspiring UXers level up their careers through her online UX career coaching program.

Matt Fenwick is a content strategist and founder of True North Content. He works on big, messy content projects for government departments in between juggling tiny humans.

Matt is a digital product strategist with a strong focus on User Experience.

For over 15 years, Matt has been analysing, designing and deploying various forms of interaction between people and technology—including web-based systems, business applications, mobile devices and media rich solutions. Matt has designed solutions for burgeoning start-ups, complex multinational organisations and as part of sophisticated IT programs.

Matt speaks regularly at national and international design and IT conferences. He has published academic papers on design methods and blogs occasionally at ixd101.

Matthew Magain runs visual communications agency Sketch Group, where he leads a team of talented copywriters, illustrators, and graphic facilitators with the shared vision of bringing the world’s stories to life through sketching.

Matthew lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is guilty of purchasing large amounts of LEGO and using the excuse of “it’s for my daughters.”

While she's currently the Senior Content Strategist at WillowTree, Melanie Seibert has taught content strategy at General Assembly and helped create websites for Razorfish, Rackspace, and cPanel. She opines about content strategy on her blog, Prose Kiln.

Mike is a Principal User Researcher at Liberty Mutual Insurance delivering insights to drive the design of a portfolio of digital products. He has been working in user experience since 1995 for companies including Thomson Reuters, Trend Micro, HP, Staples, Welch’s, Keds, and The MathWorks. He graduated from Bentley University’s Master’s Program in Human Factors and Information Design in May 2008. Mike has taught a Graduate Level course in Mobile Usability at Northeastern University. He has served as UXPA Boston board member and has presented at the Boston UXPA Conference. He has also presented at UXPA International and served as a Session Chair and planning committee member.
 

Michael McLeod is a co-founder of the educational technology company Eli Review. He has an extensive background in learning theory and technology. He has taught writing, web design, interaction design, and user experience at the university level. He has worked with scholars to design and build custom tools for their teaching and research purposes, and he eventually worked with colleagues to convert some of that intellectual property into a commercial product. The through-line of his work is how to develop ethical tools that empower humans to make better choices, rather than replacing human judgement with robots, AI, and other automation.

Originally from Washington, DC, Michelle is a Lead Product Designer at Citrix in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Michelle found her way to a UX career by way of graphic design, quality assurance, and accessibility. Michelle holds a Master’s in Interaction Design and Information Architecture from the University of Baltimore. She loves advocating for UX and having others join her in the field – to the point where she founded exploreUX, a meetup for UX enthusiasts.

Natalie Eustace is a User Experience Designer working in Christchurch. She recently completed a Masters in Human Interface Technology with the HIT Lab NZ, and her work currently focuses on digital product experiences. She has an avid interest in all things User Experience related. Follow her on LinkedIn.

Natassja is UX Mastery's resident Editor. She lives for online communication and content, and has worked in communications for Adobe, the Australian National University, and in the public sector. Based in Canberra, she wears many hats including freelance writer, digital marketer, and communications lead for TEDxCanberra.

Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. One of the pioneers in experience design, Nathan is a serial entrepreneur who works in several media and consults strategically for companies to build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers. He won a National Design Award in 2001, and holds a Masters in Business Administration from the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco.

Nick Finck is a user experience professional who has worked in the web industry for over a decade. He specializes in user experience design for web and mobile. He is the User Experience Director at Deloitte Digital, the leading digital agency specializing in mobile and emerging technologies.

Paddy Breslin is a Graphic and UX designer based in Galway, Ireland. He has been working in print design and publishing for over 15 years, on the UX design journey in recent years, and loving it.

Patrick Neeman is the Director of Product Design at nPARIO, a web analytics startup. Previous to that, he was Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a leading application tracking platform for companies like Twitter, LinkedIn and Square. He runs the UX Drinking Game and Usability Counts. Feel free to send him Whiskey as a Christmas gift.

Paul is a leader in digital transformation and user experience design thinking. He has over 20 years experience working with clients such as Doctors Without Borders, Oxford University and the European Commission. He is the author of five books, many articles for industry publications, and is a well respected presenter. He has hosted the award winning UX podcast Boagworld since its beginnings in 2005. Through consultancy and training he helps organisations make better use of digital technologies.

Per Axbom is a Swedish freelance UX Designer and co-host of uxpodcast.com. Over the past 15 years, he has consulted for more than 40 organizations, from startups to international corporations, and his Swedish blog is one of the most recognized UX blogs in the country. He is a sketching afficionado, regularly appears as a speaker, and loves to write articles on the latest digital trends.

Rebecca is a Digital Workplace professional with a passion for visual thinking. She has been applying her UX, Product, Change and Engagement knowledge to intranets and the digital workplace since 2009. Her side gig is sharing the visual thinking love through sketchnotes, graphic recording, illustrations and workshops.

Raised in farm country, Rob Prescott spent his formative years picking peaches, inventing friends and abusing his parents' Tandy TRS80. Following a short career as a deckhand, rouse-about and gas station attendant he landed his first digital job as a scanner monkey.  

Soul destroying jobs weren’t something he was all that good at, so he spent time at university earning a very expensive piece of paper that he then studiously ignored. Being an industrial designer inevitably lead him down the path to designing digital products, services and systems; and he found that he most loved doing this with like-minded researchers and designers, and so he started to grow teams.  

Twenty years on and Rob has had a haircut, and his passion for design, building teams and stalking exciting projects is matched only by his love of coffee.

Ruth is a design researcher and design leader from Canberra, Australia. In the last 16 years, she has worked across a range of industries, from airlines, to banks and government, doing research and design. She loves design research as she's fascinated by why people do the things they do, and how technology integrates into people’s lives. In her spare time, she makes science and geek themed jewellery under her Crankybot design label, using her lasercutter in her workshop.

Got a cavity? There was a time Sandy could have helped you out, but now she’s focused on wireframes and user interviews. After a brief stint staring down the mouths of friendly strangers, she moved onto staring into the souls of event goers, consumers, and eventually, product users.

She is a child of the 90s, which may go to explain the artistic direction of this submission.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher is a content strategist, writer, and the editor-in-chief of A List Apart. An advocate for meaningful, memorable, future-friendly content, Sara is the author of Content Everywhere from Rosenfeld Media, a frequent conference speaker, and an occasional blogger. She will scold you for skipping breakfast.

UX Mastery’s very own Community Manager Hawk (who is actually called Sarah, but only by her mother) first discovered the wonderful world of UX while working as a developer in the corporate world. Now working as a community consultant, Hawk inhabits that magical space between people and technology. She lives in beautiful New Zealand with her boyfriend Mal, and their soon-to-be 8 year old twins. When she’s not working and mothering, you’ll find Hawk at the gym or drinking wine.

Scott Lacey is a designer. An illustrator. A musician. A poet. An artist. A lover. And a menace to unwary long-stemmed wine glasses. After 30+ years of experience in the design industry, Scott has forgotten more about design than the most of us will learn in a lifetime (and we're desperately hoping he'll remember some of it soon!). To those around him, Scott is the living embodiment of Fingerspitzejngefühl.

With over 16 years’ UX experience, Sean is an invaluable member of U1 who leads the Melbourne team of consultants. Sean has worked in Australia, UK, Europe and USA and has qualifications in Psychology and Software Design. He has a keen interest in how we understand and interact with the environment around us and how that relates to the design of interfaces, products and services.

Shane Morris is one of Australia’s most respected user experience professionals. Over many years, Shane has gained experience working both in-house and as an external consultant. He has designed digital products and services across the web, physical devices, kiosks, mobile and tablet devices, as well as traditional desktop applications.

Shane is director of Automatic Studio, a small digital product design agency based in Australia. He regularly shares his experience at conferences, and occasionally blogs at 101 Things I Should Have Learned At Interaction Design School.

As leader and co-founder of U1 Group (formerly Usability One), Shefik Bey has a relentlessly curious nature and loves discovering new things. Renowned for being one of Australia's UX pioneers, he is constantly seeking out knowledge and is an expert in all things business management and project development. He speaks regularly at industry events and conferences and facilitates training through institutions such as the ADMA.

Stephen P. Anderson is Head of Design in the Innovation Garage at Capital One, where he is helping product teams create amazing experiences. Once a high school teacher, Stephen continues to challenge and inspire people as an international speaker and trainer; he’s presented at some of the world’s largest organizations, teaching product teams about games, play, learning, interactive visualizations, and other fun topics.

Steve Baty, principal at Meld Studios, has over 15 years experience as a design and strategy practitioner. Steve actively contributes to public discourse on these topics through the design community, articles and conferences.

Steve serves as President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and sits on the Good Design Council of Australia. He is the founder of UX Book Club; co-Chair of the UX Australia series of conferences; and served as Chair of Interaction12, the annual conference of the IxDA for 2012.

Steve is the Principal at Portigal Consulting LLC – a consultancy that helps companies discover and act on new insights about their customers and themselves. He is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and recently Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. In addition to being an in-demand presenter and workshop leader, he writes on the topics of culture, design, innovation and interviewing users, and hosts the Dollars to Donuts podcast. He’s an enthusiastic traveler and an avid photographer with a Museum of Foreign Groceries in his home.

Susan Weinschenk has a Ph.D. in Psychology, is Chief Behavioral Scientist and CEO at The Team W, Inc, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin. She consults with Fortune 1000 companies, start-ups, governments and non-profits. Dr. Weinschenk is the author of several books, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, and How To Get People To Do Stuff. Clients include Medtronic. Walmart, Disney, Amazon, and the European Union Commission. 

Tim Broadwater fancies himself an artist, designer, horror movie aficionado, decent game master for Pathfinder/Starfinder, and a starting strongman. He likes all food except arthropods, all types of games, coffee milkshakes, and tattoos. He is currently employed as a UX Software Design Engineer at Leidos, and works as a UX Unicorn for UserGoodness. Tim has over 20 years of expertise in UI design, front-end development, UX research, and content strategy. He is well-versed in digital product life cycles, Lean UX principles, and user/business goal alignment. Current areas of interest to Tim include Enterprise Software Usability and Omnichannel UX.

Trey Roady writes about cognition and the development of responsive, resilient, and ethical sociotechnical systems as The Eccentric Cog.  By day, he’s a PhD student in Texas A&M University’s Human Factors & Cognitive Systems Lab. He also holds credentials as an Associate Human Factors Professional.

He lives with his wife, daughter, and two mutually antagonistic cats in a house filled with (too many?) books.

Troy Parke is a designer who loves comic books, Hello Kitty charms, brush pens and doughnuts. Troy serves as the Senior UX Design Manager at Big Fish Games and is the Director of User Experience for UX How. He leads UX/UI/Design teams in creating compelling, usable and high performing experiences. His project clients have included Rolling Stone, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, Disney and Marvel. 

Vicky Teinaki is a Kiwi designer and researcher based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. By day she is a UX designer at the digital agency Orange Bus. In the early morning and weekends she is a PhD student at Northumbria University investigating design methods. By evening, she is a regular documenter and occasional presenter at various design and development events—usually with a power plug and aging black Macbook.

She is a former editor of the online interaction design magazine Johnny Holland and holds a degree in product design and a masters in design, both from Unitec New Zealand.