Speakers | UX Week 2011

Adam Goldstein

Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Hipmunk, the travel search site. Prior to establishing Hipmunk in 2010, Adam co-founded BookTour with Wired’s Chris Anderson. He graduated from MIT in 2010 with degrees in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and was North American Debating Champion in 2010. Adam was also the youngest author ever at O’Reilly, writing AppleScript: The Missing Manual at the age of 16. Read More...

Adam Lisagor

Trained as a filmmaker, but enamored of technology, Adam Lisagor started his company Sandwich Video somewhat by accident in late 2010 to address a need for compelling video in the tech industry. He’s made a name for himself making video for innovative companies like Square, Flipboard, Jawbone, Groupon, Genentech, Airbnb and others, who have (by some incredible luck) embraced his unconventional methods of promotional storytelling. Read More...

Alexa Andrzejewski

Alexa Andrzejewski is the Founder and CEO of Foodspotting, a visual guide to good food and where to find it. Foodspotting, a venture-backed product, was named a Hot Trend of 2010 by iTunes and one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010. Read More...

Ben Cerveny

Ben Cerveny is the founder and president of Bloom Studios, makers of visual instruments for data expression and exploration. Ben has worked for over 20 years on user interaction and experience design, concept prototyping, and strategy in the context of media applications, operating systems, web services, ubiquitous computing, and massively multiplayer games. Most recently, he was an advisor and strategist at Stamen Design, a leading visualization design studio. Read More...

Brianna Sylver

Brianna Sylver, president of Sylver Consulting, has worked with a multitude of organizations, inclusive of ABN AMRO Bank, NASA, Marriott International, and Frito-Lay to conduct customer-driven innovation initiatives. She’s a specialist in Design Ethnography, Creative Problem Solving, and Innovation, having spoken and written on each topic both nationally and globally. Read More...

Chad Jennings

Chad Jennings is a founding employee and VP of Products at Blurb, the creative publishing platform that enables you to design, publish, share and sell commercial-quality print and digital books. Chad leads the product, design, and content strategy of Blurb’s Webby Award winning Web Site, creation tools, book and digital products, and brand. Read More...

Chris Risdon

Chris Risdon is an Experience Designer at Adaptive Path. Chris’s journeyman path has helped shape his belief that finding the right blend of interaction design and communication design enables people to have compelling and useful experiences. Read More...

Chris van der Walt

Chris van der Walt is the design lead for the United Nations Global Pulse project which is developing real-time technologies to identify vulnerable populations in crises. He has also worked extensively on communications strategy and design at the UN for the last 5 years. Previously, he worked as a freelance web development consultant for a variety of corporate and NGO clients. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Read More...

Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd is a Social Scientist at Microsoft Research, a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an Associate Fellow at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society. She has worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe. net, Google and Yahoo! She has advised and consulted for dozens of other companies. Read More...

Darren David

For over 15 years, Darren has traversed the blurry edges at the intersection of technology and design, exploring nearly every conceivable project role as both client and contributor. His rich and storied career has wound from paper to pixels to people, across a myriad of companies and ventures that ultimately led to several “world’s firsts” and awards. Read More...

Indi Young

Indi is a user experience and research consultant to organizations around the world, and creator of mental model diagrams. Indi authored a book about mental model diagrams, the type of generative research necessary to empathize with people’s real situations to spark creativity. She maintains a set of prescriptions for solving problems particular to certain organizations. Read More...

Jamin Hegeman

As an Interaction and Service Designer at Adaptive Path, Jamin helps clients identify new product and service opportunities that support the needs and behaviors of the people who will use them. He has produced solutions for mobile, web, netbooks, as well as other networked products in areas such as communications, health care, media, location-based services, commerce, and social interaction. Read More...

Jared Cole

Jared Cole is a Design Strategist and Interaction Designer for Adaptive Path. He firmly believes that design is a fundamental human instinct and that learning and practicing design gives you a glimpse into what makes us tick. Jared’s particular focus is on culture, behavior and experience. Read More...

Jaron Lanier

A Renaissance Man for the 21st century, Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author who writes on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technology, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics, and the future of humanism. Read More...

Jess McMullin

Jess is the founder and President of the Centre for Citizen Experience, a startup “do tank” dedicated to advancing design innovation and strategy in the public sector. Based in Edmonton, Alberta, Jess works with clients across North America to design services, systems, and policies that make a difference in the daily lives of citizens. Read More...

Jesse James Garrett

Jesse, co-founder and president of Adaptive Path, is one of the world’s most widely recognized technology product designers. Jesse supports the company’s designers and strategists with creative guidance and helps them advance the company’s thought leadership position. Read More...

Jon Wiley

Jon Wiley leads the user experience team for Google Search. He’s been working on the Web since 1995. Jon has been in the path of two tornadoes, chased or attacked by nearly a dozen different species, been shot at twice, traveled over a thousand feet beneath the sea, discovered dinosaur bones, run a BBS, wrote an addendum to the Principia Discordia, starred in viral videos seen by millions, and was included in Gregory Peck’s biography. Read More...

Julian Bleecker

Julian Bleecker is a designer, technologist and researcher at the Advanced Design studio, Nokia Design in Los Angeles and the Near Future Laboratory. He investigates emerging social practices and networked interaction rituals. His focus is on hands-on design, physical construction, prototyping, observation, prop-making and designed science fictions as a way to raise questions, tune in weak signals, reveal hidden insights and yield innovations that could make the world a more habitable, playful place. Read More...

Kate Rutter

Kate Rutter is an experience designer with a passion for participatory design and creative cultures. During her 15+ years in the web industry, she’s honed her talent for bringing companies and customers closer together through smart strategies and inventive design. She actively embraces the term “specialized generalist. Read More...

Kevin Cheng

Kevin is a product lead at Twitter where he managed the redesign of Twitter.com dubbed #NewTwitter. In addition, he’s busy finishing his book See What I Mean: How to Communicate Ideas With Comics. Kevin enjoys crossing his passions in gaming, comics, design and technology and discovering what comes out the other end. Read More...

Kevin Hoffman

Prior to joining Happy Cog, Kevin M. Hoffman had spent more than a decade building websites, developing online strategies, and leading projects for colleges and universities in Baltimore, MD. He has been a consistent voice for intelligent communication strategies and an expert consensus builder in environments where vastly differing, passionate opinions were the norm. Read More...

Kristian Simsarian

Dr. Kristian Simsarian is the undergraduate Interaction Design program chair at California College of the Arts (CCA). He believes in the power of design to simplify, enrich, and transform our lives and the world. His work focuses on bringing innovative human-centered design and strategy to meaningful fruition for companies and institutions, from pixels to processes. Read More...

Kristina Halvorson

Kristina Halvorson is the founder and CEO of Brain Traffic, a world-renowned content strategy consultancy. She is the author of Content Strategy for the Web (2009); the founder of Confab: The Content Strategy Conference; and the host of Content Talks, a weekly 5×5 podcast. Read More...

Luke Wroblewski

Luke is currently Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Bagcheck Inc. Prior to this, he was an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital and the Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo! Inc. where he worked on product alignment and forward-looking integrated customer experiences on the Web, mobile, TV, and beyond. Read More...

Mark Trammell

Mark Trammell is a design researcher at Twitter. His work on the Web spans 14 years including coauthoring two books on Web standards and tenures with Digg, PayPal, the Web Standards Project Educational Task Force, the University of Florida, and the United States Navy. While leading the University of Florida Web presence, he taught user-centered design and started an extensive design research program running tests throughout Florida. Trammell lives, works, and eats burritos in San Francisco. Read More...

Mike Kuniavsky

Mike Kuniavsky is a designer, writer, researcher, consultant and entrepreneur focused on people’s relationship to digital technology. He cofounded Adaptive Path and ThingM, a ubiquitous computing design studio and micro-manufacturer. He is the author of Observing the User Experience, a popular textbook of user research methods, and Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design, a guide to the user-centered design of digital products. Read More...

Murat Konar

Murat Konar is an Interaction Designer in Pixar’s Studio Tools Group. For the past six years, Murat and his teammates have been working closely with animators, layout artists, and character builders to design the successor to Pixar’s original proprietary movie making system, parts of which predate Pixar’s formal incorporation in 1986. Their goal is to make a well designed, powerful, and modern movie making system that is robust enough for the next 25 years (and beyond). Read More...

P.J. Onori

P.J. is a Design Technologist at Adaptive Path. He believes in the importance of advocating for solutions that are open, honest, fair and designed or built with the public’s best interest in mind. He is passionate about creating tools, products and services that improve the lives of both the owner and consumer in a way that is beneficial to the design and development communities. Read More...

Paul Adams

Paul works as a Product Manager at Facebook. He is widely recognized as a leading thinker on designing social interactions and spent the past four years leading user research for Google’s social projects including Google+, Gmail, Mobile and YouTube. Paul holds a Master of Science in Interactive Media and a Bachelor of Industrial Design. He writes a popular blog at ThinkOutsideIn.com. Read More...

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky is a composer, multimedia artist and writer. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum and The Wire amongst other publications. Miller’s work as a media artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts such as the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture (2000); the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries. Read More...

Paula Wellings

Paula Wellings is an Experience Designer for Adaptive Path. She is a strong believer that our designs define who we are and who we will become; she is passionate about design that illuminates our best human qualities: kindness, respect, honesty, courage, humor, charm and integrity. Read More...

Peter Boersma

Peter is an Experience Designer at Adaptive Path and our co-host for UX Week. He knows it is unlikely that he will discover the meaning of life, but believes that his work on designing systems that make dealing with large amounts of complex information easier to use, can bring humanity closer to that goal. Read More...

Philip Fierlinger

Philip Fierlinger is a co-founder and Head of Design at Xero, the popular online accounting platform. Philip oversees the design of all things Xero: product, marketing, branding and overall customer experience. In addition to customers tweeting that Xero makes accounting almost fun, it’s received multiple Webby Awards and funding from Peter Thiel. Read More...

R. Brian Stone

R. Brian Stone is a practicing designer, educator, and researcher in the area of interaction design, information design, user experience, and communication through motion. He teaches Visual Communication in the Department of Design at The Ohio State University and is a principal partner of Latitude 40 Design. Read More...

Remon Tijssen

Remon Tijssen is a lead designer at Adobe’s experience design group, where he is exploring and defining new application concepts and experiences through design and prototype development. Remon’s passion is to inject motion and play in his inventive interface solutions and gives a specific, world renowned personal touch to dynamic behaviors, accompanied by a solid visual framework. Read More...

Rob Maigret

Rob Maigret is the Senior Vice President of Innovation at Disney Interactive Media Group, the interactive entertainment segment of The Walt Disney Company, and oversees DigiSynd, which manages Disney’s brand presence in the social media space. Read More...

Russ Unger

Russ Unger is a User Experience Director for Happy Cog, a web design firm in New York City, Philadelphia and San Francisco. He is co-author of the book A Project Guide to UX Design for Peachpit Press (Voices That Matter) and is co-authoring a book on guerilla research methods with Todd Zaki Warfel due out in 2011. Read More...

Sarah B. Nelson

Sarah B. Nelson is founder and Principal at Tapir, a design leadership, strategy, and research consulting studio in San Francisco. Sarah believes in—and learned the hard way about—the importance of clear communication, honest relationships, and servant leadership in the design of complex interactive systems. Read More...

Stephen P. Anderson

Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He created the Mental Notes card deck, a tool that’s widely used by product teams to apply psychology to interaction design. He’s also of the author of the book Seductive Interaction Design, which explores this topic of psychology and design in more detail. Read More...

Steven Pemberton

Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the CWI, the Dutch National Research Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam the Netherlands. His research is in interaction, and how the underlying software architecture can support the user. He has been involved with the Web since the beginning, organising workshops at the first Web Conference in 1994 at CERN. Read More...

Sunni Brown

Sunni Brown is a business owner, creative director, speaker and co-author of one of Amazon’s Top 100 Business Books titled GameStorming: A Playbook for Rule-breakers, Innovators and Changemakers. She’s best known for her large-scale live content visualizations, and she is also the leader of The Doodle Revolution – a growing effort to debunk the myth that doodling is a distraction. Read More...

Teresa Brazen

As a Program Manager at Adaptive Path, Teresa Brazen takes cues from her experiences across a broad spectrum of disciplines (filmmaking, fine art, improv, design research, user experience design) to craft intentional environments for her teams and clients. Read More...

Todd Walthall

Todd Walthall is senior vice president of Channel Management. His primary focus is to set the strategic direction for the integration of USAA’s service delivery channels. He oversees the planning, management and fulfillment of member interactions on usaa.com, Mobile and Voiceline. Read More...

Todd Wilkens

Thanks to over a decade of experience in research and design, Todd holds a passionate belief that by truly understanding people, we can create compelling product and service experiences for users and real value for businesses. Read More...