Authors

Michael Lai

Michael Lai is a freelancing and consulting UX architect specializing in infographic and data visualization design. He has worked and consulted in a number of different industries (hospitality, research, IT, science, and engineering) and covered many UX related roles (including user research, copywriting, training, graphic design, business analysis, and information architecture) to make sure he understands the UX issues first-hand.

Mike Katz

Mike Katz leads the UX Research team at Groupon that is focused on improving the experience of Groupon merchants and consumers. Prior to working at Groupon, he held technical and leadership research positions at eBay and Yahoo! Mike is passionate about integrating the voice of the customer into product and strategic decisions.

Mike Kuniavsky

is the author of Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research (Morgan Kaufmann), and has been developing commercial websites since 1994. He is a founding partner of Adaptive Path, one of the world's premier user experience consulting companies. Previous to co-founding Adaptive Path, Mike was the interaction designer of HotBot, the award-winning search engine, and creator of the Wired User Experience Laboratory, where he served as chief investigator.

He is currently an independent consultant, focused on ubiquitous computing and on the ways that such technology changes everyday objects and experiences. His blog is www.orangecone.com.

Mike Padilla

Mike Padilla is a user experience manager at Vanguard. Mike has led front-end development efforts for such companies as Fleet Credit Cards, Mellon Private Asset Management, The Bank of New York, Radian Guaranty, and Bessemer Trust. Macromedia has featured his usability designs. He received a B.S. in mechanical engineering, focusing on ergonomics, from Cornell University. Mike is an ardent advocate of high-fidelity prototyping during requirements development. In his spare time, he designed and developed Protonotes, a free web service that allows project team members to discuss system functionality, design, and requirements directly on prototypes with "sticky notes". See Mike's portfolio at Webanza.com

Mike Steckel

is a Senior Information Architect at Trademark Media in Austin Texas.

Milan Guenther

Milan Guenther is user experience practitioner, designer and consultant in Enterprise projects. He holds a Diplom-Designer degree in visual communication from FH Düsseldorf an MBA from the Institut Supérieur du Commerce de Paris. Milan is partner at the enterprise design associates, a consultancy and design studio working on organisational identity, user experience and business technology. He works an lives in Berlin and Paris, and wherever the current project might be.

Milissa Tarquini

Milissa Tarquini is Director, User Interface Design and Information Architecture at AOL. An AOL veteran since 1995, she has been an integral part of creating the AOL legacy of designing easy-to-use software and content areas. She vaguely remembers her previous life as a graphic designer. She graduated from Hofstra University with a Bachelor’s degree from a whirlwind triple major of CompSci, Human Factors, and Fine Art. Her parents still can't believe their luck that the education they paid for has real application to her everyday work. Milissa lives in Montclair NJ, and if she is not at the AOL NYC offices trying to slash meaningless features from products, you can find her with her husband chasing their toddler-aged daughter, Isobel.

Missy Robertson-Wong

Molly Wright Steenson

Molly Wright Steenson is a designer, author, professor, and international speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of design, architecture, and artificial intelligence. She is the Senior Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine Arts, the K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University and an associate professor in the School of Design (with a courtesy appointment in the School of Architecture). Steenson is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which tells the radical history of AI’s impact on design and architecture, and the forthcoming book Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, expected 2019), co-edited with Laura Forlano & Mike Ananny. A web pioneer since 1994, she’s worked at groundbreaking design studios, consultancies, and Fortune 500 companies. She holds a PhD in Architecture from Princeton University, a Master’s in Environmental Design (architectural history) from Yale School of Architecture, and a BA in German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with honors and distinction.

Montgomery Webster

Montgomery Webster is a freelance User Experience Designer and Analytics Technologist in Bristol: http://UxMonty.com. He uses data to innovate digital experiences and simplify everyday user tasks, from personalisation interfaces to fitness simulators. In his spare time, Monty watches, listens, and reads science-fiction.

Naira Musallam

Naira is a Co-Founder of Frontier7, a platform that automates statistical expertise so users are able to gain timely insights. She is a full time Professor at NYU's Center for Global Affairs, where she teaches Applied Statistics, Analytic Skills, and Monitoring and Evaluation. She has over 13 years of experience working in the research space.

Nancy Carl

is the Residential eMarketing Specialist for Armstrong World Industries, a leading manufacturer of flooring, ceilings, and cabinets. Her job involves working with internal business units to determine their interactive needs and implement them on Armstrong's award-winning website. Prior to joining Armstrong, she was Director of Interactive Strategies at Godfrey Advertising, a large business-to-business agency, where she helped many clients develop and implement web strategies. Working in the interactive field since 1996, Nancy began as an Information Designer and held various positions since then in the nebulous, ever-changing IA realm. Her specialties include e-business strategy, usability, content management, and information organization.

Nate Bolt

Nate is fascinated by the personal, social, and cultural role of technology, and how research and design can transform those roles. After pioneering and directing the User Experience department at Clear Ink in 1999, which included the construction of Natural Environment and Remote Observation laboratories, Nate co-founded Bolt | Peters. He now serves as el presidente, where he has overseen hundreds of user research studies for Sony, Oracle, HP, Greenpeace, Electronic Arts, and others. Beginning in 2003, he led the creation of the first moderated remote user research software, Ethnio, which is being used around the world to recruit hundreds of thousands of live participants for research. Nate regularly gives presentations on native environment research methods in both commercial and academic settings, and is currently co-authoring Remote Research, a book on remote testing, published by Rosenfeld Media. Working with faculty at the University of California, San Diego, he created a degree titled "Digital Technology and Society," which focused on the social impact of technology. He also completed a year of communications studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was jailed briefly for playing drums in public without a license.

Nate Burgos

is a design manager at Chicago-based investment information innovator Morningstar, part of Fast Company's debut Fast 50. He also teaches computer graphics at Loyola University. He is the recipient of a Sappi "Ideas that Matter" design grant. He attended the Yale Summer Program in Graphic Design in Brissago, Switzerland and the Maine Summer Institute in Graphic Design. In addition to being a bibliophile of rare art and design books, his other passion projects include designfeast.com and passion-ganda.org.

Nathan Curtis

Nathan Curtis currently consults in the Washington DC area via EightShapes, LCC, a UX partnership with Dan Brown. He has been practicing varied disciplines within user experience design since 1998, and areas of interest include information architecture, interaction design, usability research, and front-end development. Prior to EightShapes, Nathan led efforts at Sprint Nextel, Inc for projects that include ecommerce shopping and checkout, account management, and web portals for wireless device data synchronization. Nathan enjoys writing about and realizing the potential of various tools of the information architect, including Adobe's InDesign and EightShapes' free template kit, EightShapes Unify (http://unify.eightshapes.com).

Nathan Gao

User Experience Designer in NYC, former Designer-in-Residence/Junior Instructor at General Assembly. Exploring the deep intersections between Information Architecture and Interaction Design.

Nathan Shedroff

Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA. This program prepares the next-generation of innovation leaders for a world that is profitable, sustainable, ethical, and truly meaningful. The program unites the perspectives of systems thinking, design and integrative thinking, sustainability, and generative leadership into a holistic strategic framework. Students learn to create innovative products, services, and policy, as well as new business models. He is a pioneer in Experience Design, Interaction Design and Information Design, speaks and teaches internationally, and is a serial entrepreneur. His many books include: Experience Design 1.1, Making Meaning, Design is the Problem, Design Strategy in Action, and the upcoming Make It So. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School and a BS in Industrial Design from Art Center College of Design. He worked with Richard Saul Wurman at TheUnderstandingBusiness and, later, co-founded vivid studios, a decade-old pioneering company in interactive media and one of the first Web services firms on the planet. vivid’s hallmark was helping to establish and validate the field of information architecture, by training an entire generation of designers in the newly emerging Web industry. Nathan is on the board of directors for Teague and the AIGA.

Nick Cawthon

Nick Cawthon is a UX practitioner located in the San Francisco Bay Area. His focus has been interaction design, prototyping, and user research on desktop and mobile devices. He has written a book, Aesthetic and the Usability of Data Visualization, published during his time at the University of Sydney while pursing a graduate Human Computer Interaction research degree. Nick is also an event organizer for the local Interaction Designer's Association, where he co-ordinates monthly talks given by leaders within the industry. When not pushing pixels for his consultancy, Gauge Design, Nick enjoys rowing on the Oakland estuary before dawn and is constantly dreaming of new metaphors for the frustrations of corporate stagnation. Follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

Noreen Whysel

Noreen Whysel leads Validation Research at Internet Safety Labs, a standards development organization, where she created a UX audit process for “Safe & Respectful Technology.” She is a Co-Founder and COO of Decision Fish, a decision literacy firm that hosts the Behavioral Economics NYC meet-up. She teaches UX & UI Design at CUNY City Tech. She also serves on a number of privacy and accessibility working groups at Kantara Initiative and the W3C, developing trusted identity standards and ethical frameworks for responsible connected technology. Many IAs know her from when she was the Operations Manager at the Information Architecture Institute from 2005-2014. She is a coordinating member of UX Camp DC and NYC, a board member of GISMOnyc.

She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, an economics professor at BMCC, and a very floofy cat named Luna. She has two grown children and guest passes to Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Museum (hint, hint). Her degrees include a BA in Psychology from Columbia College and a MSLIS from Pratt Institute.

Her talk “Shedding Light on Dark Patterns” was presented at the 2021 IAC: the information architecture conference.

Oded Napchi

Oded comes from a rich and extensive background in mass media. Following years of experience in traditional media as a radio station manager, TV show runner and chief content officer for the Israeli cables, In 1999 Oded founded Valis, a mobile communities start up that was the first to introduce location based communities. At 2008 Oded joined HIRO-Media the world leader for online video advertising. Since 2010 Oded serves CSO of HIRO-Media Oded holds a BA in Philosophy of Ideas from TAU and currently progressing with his MA in Philosophy of Ideas