Speakers

Michael B. Johnson

Dr. Michael B. Johnson leads the Moving Pictures Group at Pixar Animation Studios. His group is responsible for the design, implementation and support of the pre-production pipeline for Pixar features and shorts. This includes Story, Editorial, Art, Production Management, and the review process. His team works directly with the directors, editors, producers, production designers, art directors, artists and production groups who start the process of bringing Pixar stories to the screen. Dr. Johnson has been at Pixar since 1993, and has has written tools for all of Pixar’s feature films (and many of their short films), including storyboarding, pre-viz, layout, animation, modelling, lighting, rendering, and editorial tools.

Prior to Pixar, Michael attended the University of Illinois where he earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science Engineering. He studied abroad for a year in Swansea, Wales and also worked for NCSA, Thinking Machines, IBM and MIT’s Media Lab. He completed his Masters of Science in Visual Studies and his PhD in Computer Graphics and Animation at the MIT Media Lab, where Dr. Edwin Catmull (founder of Pixar) was on his thesis committee. He lives in Oakland CA with his wife and daughter.

Michael will be presenting Making Movies is Hard Fun: Building Tools for Telling Stories on Day 1

Peter Morville

Peter Morville is a writer, speaker, and consultant. He is best known for helping to create the discipline of information architecture. His bestselling books include Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability. Peter’s latest book, Search Patterns, is being published by O’Reilly Media in 2010. He advises such clients as AT&T, Harvard, IBM, the Library of Congress, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute, Vodafone, and the Weather Channel. His work on experience design and the future of search has been covered by Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal.

Peter lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife, two daughters, and a dog named Knowsy. He blogs at findability.org.

Peter will be presenting Search Patterns: The Future of Discovery on Day 1 and running the Information Architecture with Maps workshop on Day 2.

Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud has been writing and drawing independent comic books since 1984. His book Understanding Comics was a New York Times Notable book for 1994, and is available in 15 languages. McCloud has lectured on comics and digital media at Harvard University, MIT, Pixar, Microsoft and The Smithsonian Institution.

Scott will be presenting Experiencing Comics on Day 1.

Jeff Patton

Jeff Patton has designed and developed software for the past 12 years on a wide variety of projects from on-line aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records. Jeff has focused on Agile approaches since working on an early Extreme Programming team in 2000. In particular Jeff has specialized in the application of user centered design techniques to improve Agile requirements, planning, and products. Some of his recent writing on the subject can be found at www.AgileProductDesign.com and Alistair Cockburn’s Crystal Clear.

Jeff will be running the Real-World Agile User Experience Design workshop on Day 2.

Liz Danzico

Liz Danzico is part designer, part educator, and part editor. She is chair and co-founder of the MFA in Interaction Design Program at the School of Visual Arts. She is an independent consultant in New York and user experience consultant for Happy Cog, on the editorial board for Rosenfeld Media, columnist for Interactions Magazine, and on the board of Design Ignites Change. Liz has been adjunct faculty at the New School University and the Fashion Institute of Technology, and lectures widely.

She grew up in Northeast Pennsylvania, USA, and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Liz has written for Adobe, AIGA Journal of Design, Business Week, UX Matters, and writes ongoing for Bobulate.com.

Liz will be presenting Designing for Improvisation on Day 1 and running the User Interview Techniques workshop on Day 2.

Jesse James Garrett

Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and president of Adaptive Path, is one of the world's most widely recognized technology product designers. His book, The Elements of User Experience, has been called brilliant and essential and is considered one of the seminal works on user-centered design. Jesse is a frequent keynote speaker addressing audiences around the world on product design, user experience, and innovation.

Jesse will be presenting Design for Engagement on Day 1.

Joshua Porter

Joshua Porter is the founder of Bokardo Design and is the co-creator of ABtests.com. A long-time interface designer & consultant, Josh focuses exclusively on the design of social web applications. Josh wrote the book Designing for the Social Web and speaks regularly at web design conferences and events around the world.

Since 2003 he has written the popular design blog bokardo.com. Josh lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.

Josh will be presenting Metrics-driven Design on Day 1 and running the Designing for the Usage Lifecycle workshop on Day 3.

Stephen P. Anderson

Stephen P. Anderson is an independent consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He spends an unhealthy amount of time thinking about user experience design and intrapreneurial teams—topics he also speaks about at various national and international events.

Stephen is currently creating the Mental Notes card deck to help product teams apply psychology to interaction design.

Stephen will be presenting The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions on Day 1 and running the How To Think With Pretty Pictures (Demystifying Concept Models) workshop on Day 2.

Leah Buley

Leah Buley is an experience designer for Adaptive Path. She is interested in the potential of user experience design to help businesses make better decisions. She has worked with organizations in a variety of industries, including financial, legal, telecom, and non-profit.

Before Adaptive Path, Leah was a user interface designer for Barclays Global Investors. She designed transactional financial systems, client-facing web sites, end-investor tools, and internal applications. Leah started her career in design as an opinionated web developer.

Leah has a Master's degree in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University and Bachelors in American Studies from Barnard College. She is a member of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and the Information Architecture Institute.

Leah will be running the Good Design Faster workshop on Day 2.

Dave Gray

Dave Gray is the founder and chairman of XPLANE Corp., an information design consultancy serving Fortune 100, NGO and government clients around the world. An artist, journalist and information designer, he is passionate about applied creativity.

Dave will be running the Knowledge Games workshop on Day 2.

Karen McGrane

If the internet is more awesome than it was in 1995, Karen would like to claim a very tiny piece of the credit. For more than 15 years Karen has helped create more usable digital products through the power of user experience design and content strategy. Today, as Senior Partner at Bond Art + Science, she works with clients to create personalized portals that dynamically update based on user behavior, develops data visualizations that make complex quantitative information easy to understand, and consults with publishers on ways to make their sites more appealing to readers and successful for advertisers.

Prior to starting Bond, Karen was Vice President of User Experience at Razorfish, where she led projects for clients including The New York Times, Conde Nast, Disney, and Citibank.

Karen also teaches in the MFA program in Interaction Design at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and speaks at events around the world. Most recently she was one of the speakers at the Content Strategy Forum in Paris.

Karen will be running the Content Strategy workshop on Day 2.

Whitney Hess

Whitney Hess is a user experience design consultant based in New York City. She helps make products easy and pleasurable to use.

Prior to going independent, Whitney was on the design team at Liquidnet, an international financial software company that runs the leading electronic marketplace for wholesale stock-trading. Previously, she was an interaction designer at two marketing agencies, Digitas and Tribal DDB, where her clients included American Express, The New York Times, Allstate, Claritin, Tropicana, and EarthLink. Most notably, she helped to conceive, design, and test an innovative card search tool for American Express, and is named as a co-inventor on its U.S. patent.

Whitney is a strategic partner with Happy Cog and consults with startups and major corporations, and everyone in between. She writes about technology and customer experience on her blog, Pleasure and Pain, and can always be reached on Twitter @whitneyhess.

Whitney will be running the DIY UX workshop on Day 3.

Dan Lockton

Dan is an independent design consultant, and a researcher at Brunel University in London, investigating how design can influence user behaviour for environmental and social benefit, across products, services and environments. His evolving Design with Intent toolkit aims to help designers faced with "behaviour change" problems, by offering a range of applicable design patterns drawn from cognitive and social psychology, behavioural economics, architecture, human-computer interaction and ergonomics.

Since 2005, Dan’s blog, also called Design with Intent (formerly, Architectures of Control) has charted examples — good and evil — of design being used to influence user behaviour "in the wild".

Dan will be running the Design With Intent workshop on Day 3.

James Box

A self-confessed ‘user experience professional’, James works for Clearleft in the jolly seaside town of Brighton, England. Part information architect and part interaction designer, when he’s not crafting sandcastles on the beach, James crafts websites that are fun and easy to use.

Thinking about who he’s worked with makes him feel old and grumpy. But give him a few drinks and he’ll prattle on about his work as a Government agent (DirectGov and the HMRC), his telly-box contacts (like the BBC and Channel 4) or how he remembers when all these social networks were just fields.

James will be running the Universal Principles of UX workshop on Day 3.

Cennydd Bowles

Cennydd is obsessed with making the web a better place and has several years’ experience of doing just that on e-commerce, government and community sites. As a user experience designer at Clearleft, he thinks, writes and practices information architecture, interaction design and usability like there’s no tomorrow.

Cennydd will be running the Universal Principles of UX workshop on Day 3.

Andy Budd

Andy is a founding partner and Managing Director of Clearleft. He also goes by the title of User Experience Director depending what mood he’s in. Andy is the author of CSS Mastery, curates the dConstruct and UX London events and is responsible for Silverback, a low cost usability testing application for the Mac.

Andy will be running the Guerilla Usability Testing workshop on Day 3.