This text was produced with the help of contributions and hard work from a number of different individuals. Each of these contributors have years of experience leading creative teams of interaction designers and producing the products and services you use on a daily basis.
Jon Kolko
Associate Creative Director, frog design
Jon has worked extensively in both the professional and academic worlds of interaction design, manipulating complicated technological constraints in order to best solve the problems of Fortune 500 clients and educating future interaction designers to do the same. His work has extended into the worlds of supply chain management, demand planning, pricing and configuration, and customer-relationship management, and he has worked with clients such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cisco, Ford, IBM, Microsoft, Palm, and other leaders of the Global 2000. The common underlying theme of these problems and projects was the creation of a solution that was useful, usable, and desirable.
Ellen Beldner
User Experience Director, ChoiceVendor
Ellen Beldner is the User Experience director at ChoiceVendor, a business software startup in San Francisco. She has been designing software in Silicon Valley since 2000, including four years as a UE designer at Google and a year leading the design of YouTube's monetization and copyright-monitoring software. Ellen graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in HCI and professional writing, and her focus is on enterprise and expert-use software.
Uday Gajendar
Interaction Designer, Freelance
Uday Gajendar is a prolific interaction designer. His work has spanned enterprise software, creative tools, web & mobile applications, and consumer devices at Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, and Netflix. Uday has also consulted at agencies like frog design and Involution Studios. Holding degrees in both interaction design (Carnegie Mellon) and industrial design (The University of Michigan), Uday continues to evolve his place within industry, pursuing challenges both wicked and aesthetic. He advances the field with talks and articles about beauty, leadership, and strategy. Further musings about design are posted at his professional blog, http://www.ghostinthepixel.com.
Chris Connors
Designer, Apple
Chris Connors is currently employed at Apple. Prior to working at Apple, Chris worked at NASA with a focus on designing future mission support tools for planning robotic activity during surface operations on Mars. Chris also has an extensive background with Trilogy Software in Austin, Texas, where he designed enterprise software products for the Financial Services, Computer, and Automotive industries. Chris was one of two lead designers for Trilogy subsidiary carOrder.com, winner of PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award for Best Online Car Buying site in 1999.
Justin Petro
Principal, Thinktiv
A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Justin is Principal of Thinktiv, where he works to solve strategic business problems with user-centric design solutions. Justin has worked with Dell, Trilogy, Maya, Siemens, and Merrill Lynch, has been awarded patents in both hardware and software design, and has lectured at leading design schools in the United States.