Authors

Aaron T. Travis

Aaron Travis is CEO of PolySuite.com: Web Tools Reinvented (a new take on the Search Engine, Browser and Bookmark.) He has been working to develop user experiences for over 12 years in industries like education, video games, healthcare, publishing and finance. He is also User Experience Design Lead for Citi Private Bank, and former Adjunct Professor for the Graduate School of Interactive Communications at Quinnipiac University, teaching User Centered Design. Previously, as User Experience Lead at Condé Nast Digital, Aaron architected for numerous high-profile magazines such as Glamour, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He brings together insights from a wide variety quantitative research (surveys, analytics, etc.) and qualitative studies (interviews, eye-tracking, and usability). Aaron received an MBA in Computer Information Systems, with highest honors, from Baruch College in New York. At the University of Michigan, Travis earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, cum laude, with a concentration in digital design and animation. He is also a Human Factors International Certified Usability Analyst (CUA). Email: Aaron.Travis (at) PolySuite.com. Twitter: @attravis

Abby Covert

Abby Covert is an independent information architect working and living in New York City. With a proven track record in establishing user-centric practices in a variety of creative environments, Abby also has a reputation for stellar information architecture work in a variety of consulting contexts. Her diverse portfolio includes work for among others: Nike, IHOP, Herman Miller, Kraft Foods, Sharpie, JELL-O, Prismacolor, Expo Markers, Valspar, KMART, Taco Bell, KFC, State Farm and The United States Postal Service, BlueCross BlueShield, JSTOR, Fidelity Investments, Bank of America, The Hartford Insurance. Abby prides herself on being an active organizer and mentor within the design community. She served as Executive Producer for IDEA in 2010 and the Information Architecture Summit in 2010 and 2012. Abby serves as an advisor for and holds credit for inventing World Information Architecture Day, which held an inaugural event in 2012 with 14 locations globally serving over 1600 attendees.

Adam Polansky

Adam Polansky is an experienced UX Director and Information Architect in both Web and Mobile. He led efforts for such companies as Travelocity, Dr Pepper, Radio City Entertainment, Starwood Hotels, Scholastic and Texas Instruments. He is a contributing author to “Usability Success Stories – How Organizations Improve By Making Easier-To-Use Software and Web Sites” - Gower Publishing, 2006 He is involved with several UX professional organizations as an officer, mentor and storyteller.

Afshan Kirmani

With over 10 years of experience in customer experience, Afshan delivers ecommerce experiences based on omni-channel content and commerce solutions. She specializes in conversion-centric design, using behavioural psychology to persuade and drive conversions. Her projects focus on discovery and definition for content management and commerce platforms, and her design solutions have a proven track record of delivering growth in strategic accounts and revenue streams within global enterprises. Afshan has worked on Web sites and applications that take a mobile-first, responsive approach to produce designs that span hand-held devices, wearables, and retail kiosks. Her experience touches on social media, analytics, applications that leverage personalized content, and user experiences that optimize customer retention to increase sales.

Alana Schroeder

Alana is a UX researcher and content strategist in Salt Lake City, where she combines content best practices, analytics analysis, and user testing to create user-focused sites. She’s especially interested in task analysis, information architecture, and user-centric language. Outside her day job, she consults for a variety of groups—from science and technology companies to advocacy organizations. She’s endlessly fascinated by how language can nudge user behavior and reduce cognitive load. Find her on LinkedIn and Twitter: @ealanaschroeder.

Alejo Jumat

Alejo is Vice President, Experience Design at Pascal Metrics, Inc. His mission is to bring Experience Design to the world of healthcare focusing on providing tools for clinicians that help assess, measure and prevent patient harm in hospital settings. He is dedicated to improving the safety of healthcare through Design. Get in touch: www.linkedin.com/in/alejojumat/

Alesha Arp

Alesha Arp is a senior UX research leader, and catalyst of human-centered change. She’s turned a research lens on organizations, cross-functional teams, processes, digital & physical places and products to create human-centered, desirable, usable, impactful experiences. She is a speaker, writer, and mentor in this community of people and practice. She’s been dubbed a “polar bear wrangler” for her work with the information architecture conference, and “insights wolf” for her ability to hunt and nurture the insights that lead to impactful change for organizations and teams.

Alex Chang

Alex has been cruising the information highway since the days of Mosaic and Lynx, when the popular method of IM was the Unix Talk command and his favorite mail client was PINE. Since 2001, Alex has been leading Web development projects for various organizations working with different Web platforms. He also started April3rd.com (which is still under development, evident by the ever-present Coming Soon page), aimed to be a resource and community site to help bring the best practices and knowledge in both technology and design to the Web arena. Currently by day, Alex is an infrastructure lead at a management consulting firm overseeing internal Web application development efforts; by night he continues to fine-tune his skills as a hybrid of a front-end designer and a back-end Web architect by experimenting with various Web technologies and exploring design ideas while diving into topics such as usability, accessibility, and information architecture.

Alex Kirtland

Alex is a user experience design and usability professional with over 10 years of experience. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies, as well as start-ups, helping them envision and improve the experiences and usability of their web sites and applications. His interests include online markets (including prediction markets, financial markets, healthcare markets, and so on), information dashboards, trading interfaces, information design, and economics. You can find out more about him at his personal website. He also writes the blog UsableMarkets.

Alex Wright

Alex Wright is the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. He currently works as an information architect for the New York Times.

Alexa Andrzejewski

Alexa Andrzejewski is an interaction designer for Adaptive Path. She is driven by the belief that improving even one person's life through attentive design can have far-reaching effects, a belief born from her experience designing complex interactive products for industries ranging from healthcare to finance. Before joining Adaptive Path, Alexa worked at the user-insight consultancy Lextant, where she walked in the shoes of nuclear pharmacists, technical support workers and insurance customers. By understanding and then designing for the different worlds of these users, she helped to develop successful products for clients including Nationwide, Cardinal Health, Johnson & Johnson, CheckFree and Hewlett-Packard. Alexa holds a B.S. in Visual Communication from The Ohio State University, where her information graphics work won awards from the Columbus Society of Communicating Arts. Alexa and her husband, a city planner, share a passion for bringing user experience awareness to environmental design, an interest she explores at length in her blog, This Place Is (http://www.thisplaceis.com).

Alexander Wilms

Alex works in the internal IT department of a large international financial services provider. He is coordinating the Central European Business Analysis Group, working on Requirements and Usability Engineering, System Analysis and Process Consulting. Alex has also been Project Manager on several Knowledge Management and Content Management projects.

Alison J. Head

Alison J. Head is the Principal and Founder of Alison J. Head & Associates, a research firm in Sonoma, California, providing usability research and testing services to Fortune 500 and other clients [www.ajhead.com]. Alison is the author of two books about usability: Design Wise: A Guide for Evaluating the Interface Design of Information Resources (CyberAge Books, 1999) and On-the-Job Research: How Usable Are Corporate Research Intranets? (Special Libraries Association, 2002). She has a MLS and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Studies from U.C. Berkeley and studied Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University, as a Visiting Scholar. When she's not conducting usability studies, Alison teaches at Saint Mary's College, where she is the Roy and Patricia Disney Visiting Professor in New Media. At home, she enjoys tending her six-acre garden.

Alla Kholmatova

is an interaction and visual UI designer working in London. Alla studied design and linguistic theory in Saint-Petersburg, before coming to London and completing a degree in Media Arts. Having previously worked on interactive learning systems at Saffron Interactive, and the market analysis & trading software at Thomson Reuters, she now helps to design a new line of HR applications. Connect @craftui.

Alma Derricks

is the founder and principal of REV, a unique business strategy consultancy that provides firms imaginative strategic guidance, new revenue-creation models and fresh insight into what motivates and inspires customers.

Ambrose Little

Ambrose is principal design technologist at Infragistics, maker of Indigo Studio, Quince, and lots of reusable UI controls and tools for devs. Ambrose splits his time between product management for Indigo Studio and emerging Web technologies research, experimentation, and strategery. Happy to connect @ambroselittle or /in/ambroselittle. More blatherings at ambroselittle.com.

Amy Jiménez Márquez

Amy Jiménez Márquez is the owner and Publisher of Boxes and Arrows. She’s also a Design Director at a tech startup, and formerly led the Alexa Personality Design team at Amazon.

Amy has been a design professional since the late 1990s, working in both corporate and freelance settings. With a Master’s degree in Directing, she’s also been performing improvisational comedy for over 20 years, and enjoys applying improv collaboration techniques to her daily work.

You can connect with her on Twitter (@amymarquez) and LinkedIn.

Ana Peralta

Ana V Peralta is a User Experience Designer, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), and User Experience Strategist based in Austin, Texas. Ana is known for her work with the Dell IT Support site, Facebook’s Transparency reports and Disney’s Corporate Retreat e-brochure website. She now specializes in applying Design Thinking to develop website + web applications + mobile applications and product roadmaps to set them up for customer engagement and usability success. Her favorite part about her career is the flexibility, work-life balance, and ability to take on projects of her choosing in her free time. When not working, you can catch Ana traveling to different countries around the world, taking photographs of her surroundings, eating pizza or being active in Austin’s outdoor scenery.

Anders Ramsay

Anders Ramsay has been practicing User Experience design for over a decade, designing and producing both consumer-facing and enterprise applications for clients in the finance and entertainment industries. Anders is also active in the UX community as speaker, instructor, and panelist, as well as founder of the New York City IA Meetup. Anders blogs about all things UX at www.andersramsay.com. He is currently an independent consultant in New York City.

Anders Toxboe

Anders Toxboe is a product coach, writer, blogger, and designer. He runs a mentor platform for UX & Product professionals called Learning Loop and cares deeply about building engaging user experiences, which he blogs about on UI-Patterns.com. To learn more about persuasive patterns, visit his blog at UI-Patterns.com, buy his persuasive pattern card deck, or book Anders as a mentor on Learning Loop.