Angel Kittiyachavalit is a visual and user experience designer and a Code for America Fellow. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Economics. After a marketing internship with ReadyMade Magazine, she decided she wanted a career in design. Her interest in behavioral economics and human psychology led her into user experience design. Most recently she was a user experience designer at a fashion startup, where she launched a user testing program and designed everything from web to print. She also loves learning different languages and speaks English, Thai, Spanish, and some Mandarin.
[Read more]
Brad Cohen is the Director of Interactive Strategy for JESS3 - a creative agency that specializes in telling stories in interesting and innovative ways. He brings experience as a Creative Design Director and Content Strategist with an understanding of interpersonal and group dynamics on the social web. He has worked in various agency environments helping organizations of all kinds discover and craft messages that resonate within communities.
[Read more]
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. Before joining Adaptive Path, Chris was Senior User Experience Architect at user experience consultancy Macquarium, helping improve the online product experience for clients such as Lowes.com and InterContinental Hotels Group. Prior to that, Chris was Lead User Experience Designer for a start-up in video syndication defining the user experience for all their consumer facing products.
[Read more]
As VP of Research at Bolt|Peters, Cyd Harrell coaches the top remote research team in the world. She's a passionate believer in real time research and has taught everyone from interns to senior researchers how to get remote. In the course of more than 200 remote studies, Cyd and her team have made user experience real for clients such as Sony, EA, Volkswagon, Rdio, and Autodesk. Cyd co-founded San Francisco Women on the Web, brought design standards to both the website and the broker desktop at Charles Schwab, and advises Code for America on citizen experience issues.
[Read more]
Elizabeth Hunt is a user experience strategist and designer and a Code for America Fellow. After graduating from the University of New Mexico with a Ph.D. in English Literature, she began working in the technology industry. Over the past ten years, she’s worked as a web designer, instructional designer, user experience designer, and creative director. During that time, she’s designed applications and online experiences, as well as a travel program, for clients such as American Express Travel, Target, and Microsoft.
[Read more]
Emily Wright is a designer and graphic artist focused on usability and visual storytelling. As a 2012 Code for America Fellow, Emily is working with the city of Austin to help homeowners deal with the changing climate in Texas. She has also worked with several Bay Area groups including Banned by the Bay, Red Ink Studios, Intersection for the Arts, Visual Ink, and Babeland. With a background in illustration from California College of Arts, she is always looking for ways to spin a good story that helps explain complicated scenarios and data sets.
[Read more]
For over 12 years, Greg has been designing experiences that work for Fortune 500 companies. Greg is the author of Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success (Wiley, 2011). Greg’s second Wiley book on mobile and tablet design is due out later this year. He writes about mobile and tablet UX design on DesignCaffeine.com
[Read more]
James leads the Visual Thinking practice at Xplane | Dachis Group. He believes that visualization is essential to understanding what things are, how they work, and why they matter. He works side-by-side with high tech, government and military clients to shape strategy, transformation and communication programs. With co-authors Dave Gray and Sunni Brown, James has written Gamestorming as a guide to getting started in combining the power of visualization with the structure of the group process.
[Read more]
Jamin Hegeman is a Design Director at Adaptive Path, where he leads project teams and helps define the creative practice. His work includes designing solutions in healthcare, education, finance, media, commerce, and social interaction for an array of clients, from large international organizations to startups. Previously, he was a senior designer at Nokia, a master of design student at Carnegie Mellon University, a web consulting business owner, an editor, and a journalist.
[Read more]
Jared 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 is a Design Director at Adaptive Path. He works closely with organizations to identify new strategic opportunities for product and service innovation, discovering new ways for design to deliver greater value to employees and customers. Jared has had the good fortune of working with all kinds of companies, from small non-profit arts organizations to large multinational financial services, addressing everything from large strategic service and organizational design problems to detailed visual design.
[Read more]
Jennifer Fraser is the Director of Design at Macadamian. After more than fourteen years working as a User Experience Designer, Jennifer has designed a broad range of products that have targeted very different audiences, from creative professionals to large government agencies. She has also had the opportunity to work closely with various technology partners, such as Microsoft, Wacom and HP, to understand their requirements and to create designs to meet their needs, as well as the needs of their customers.
[Read more]
Kim Goodwin is the author of the bestselling book, Designing for the Digital Age. Kim helps clients build their own design competencies and cultures, both through organizational consulting and through leading highly collaborative research and design engagements. You may also know Kim from her previous work as Vice-President, Design and General Manager at Cooper, leading an integrated practice of interaction, visual, and industrial designers and the development of the acclaimed Cooper U design curriculum.
[Read more]
Mary Piontkowski, Macadamian’s Director, User Experience, is a user experience specialist who has worked with other high-profile companies such as Adaptive Path, Organic, and Macromedia. Through her strategic approach, creative expertise, and mastery of a variety methods for design and innovation, Mary has helped build robust experiences for Fortune 100 and 500 companies such as Macy's, Levi's, PayPal, Hasbro, Sprint, Allstate, and Microsoft.
[Read more]
Melissa Rach is vice president of content strategy at Brain Traffic, a world-renowned content strategy firm, where she leads an elite team of content strategists that tackles messy content problems for clients worldwide. Melissa has been working as a communications and content specialist for nearly 20 years. Although she’s worked on all types of enterprise content projects, online content is “secretly” her favorite. Since working on her first interactive project in 1993, she has become a respected authority on how organizations incorporate online content into their overall communications plans.
[Read more]
Patrick Quattlebaum is a Design Director at Adaptive Path. Patrick craves taking on the most complex design problems he can find regardless of the medium or context. He passionately advocates for elevating the humanity within institutions to ensure both business and community sustainability. Patrick joined Adaptive Path after nearly a decade of service at Macquarium Intelligent Communications, where he built the firm’s user experience practice from the ground up. Patrick instilled in his organization a philosophy of blending a human-centered design methodology with a pragmatic consultative approach.
[Read more]
Paul Adams is the Global Head of Brand Design at Facebook. He works with the worlds leading brands and ad agencies, using his background in social research and design to help them be successful on Facebook. Previously at Facebook he was the Product Manager responsible for Facebook's ad units. In Nov 2011, Fortune magazine described Paul as "one of Silicon Valley's most wanted." His work has been widely published and cited, and his talk on the future of the web is one of the most viewed presentations online.
[Read more]
A co-founder of BATS Improv, Rebecca has been performing with BATS Company since 1989. Rebecca was the Dean of the BATS School of Improv from 1992 to 2003. Rebecca has been designing and teaching improvisation workshops since 1984. She has created and implemented improvisational theatre workshops and programs for several theatre training programs including: the American Conservatory Theatre Advanced Training Program; The Berkeley Repertory School of Theatre; the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; and Stanford University.
[Read more]
Robin Hunicke is currently the Executive Design Wrangler at Tiny Speck, working on the whimsical and creative online game Glitch. A computer scientist and designer by training, she specializes in designing experiences that broaden the range and age of players who enjoy video games. Her prior titles include the PS3 Downloadable sensation Journey, Steven Speilberg's Boom Blox series and MySims for Nintendo Wii.
[Read more]
After more than 10 years of customer focused work at companies like Amazon.com and Microsoft, Samantha Starmer is now the Director of Customer Experience at the outdoor gear and apparel company REI (Recreational Equipment Inc.). This work includes leading cross-channel customer experience strategy, design, and information architecture teams, and contributing to the overall leadership of the business. She is passionate about designing and evangelizing for holistic customer experiences that are seamless and provide delight across channels, time, and devices.
[Read more]
Sheba Najmi is a user experience designer and product strategist, and a Code for America Fellow. At Yahoo! she was a lead designer for Yahoo! Mail, the company’s flagship service with over two hundred million users. Most recently, Sheba co-founded a startup focused on the oft-overlooked baby boomer and senior citizen audiences. She earned an MS degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, where she investigated the language, thought, and interaction of humans and computers.
[Read more]
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]
Tiffany is currently a Senior Information Designer at JESS3, where she spends her day turning reams of data into beautiful visualizations. Since graduating 3 years ago with a first-class honors degree in New Media, Tiffany has freelanced for a number of organizations including Fast Company and Column Five Media, and during her time at JESS3 has worked on many data visualization projects for clients such as Google, Microsoft and American Express. Her work has been featured all over the web including Huffington Post, GOOD and FastCo Design, and most recently you will be able to find a few of her graphics in Taschen's new book, Information Graphics.
[Read more]
Todd Zaki Warfel is a craftsman who loves designing with data, grids, and type. As a Sr. UX Designer at Inflection, he's currently tackling big data design challenges for mobile, tablet, and desktop applications.
[Read more]