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Books & People
Books, People
Archives
Book Reviews
- A Whole New Mind
- Access by Design
- Bringing Design to Software
- Contextual Design
- Cultivating Communities of Practice
- Design Research – Methods and Perspectives
- Designing Interactions
- Designing the User Interface
- Digital Ground
- Effective Prototyping for Software Makers
- Elements of Graph Design
- GUI Bloopers
- GUI Bloopers 2.0 new
- Hertzian Tales
- How Designers Think
- In the Bubble
- Information Dashboard Design
- Information Design
- Information Visualization
- Information Visualization, 2nd Edition
- Leonardo's Laptop
- Making the Web Work
- Observing the User Experience
- Paper Prototyping
- Participatory IT Design
- Press On
- Processing
- Shaping Things
- Sketching User Experiences in prep
- Systemisches Design
- Technology as Experience
- The Craft of Information Visualization
- The Design of Everyday Things
- The Plenitude
- The International Handbook of Creativity
- The Laws of Simplicity
- The Semiotic Engineering of Human-Computer Interaction
- Thoughtful Interaction Design
- Understanding Your Users
- Universal Principles of Design
- Universal Usability
- Usability-Management bei SAP-Projekten
- Visual Thinking for Design in prep
- Web Bloopers
- Windows and Mirrors
- Writing Effective Uses Cases
Featured UI & Design People (Archive)
Last update: 08/05/2008
Here we compile short presentations of featured UI and graphic design people. See the People page for further data, such as e-mail addresses, Websites, etc.
List of Featured People
Bill Buxton Trained as a musician, Bill Buxton began using computers over thirty years ago in his art. This early experience, both in the studio and on stage, helped develop a deep appreciation of both the positive and negative aspects of technology and its impact. This increasingly drew him into both design and research, with a very strong emphasis on interaction and the human aspects of technology. He first came to prominence for his work at the University of Toronto
on digital musical instruments and the novel interfaces that he employed.
This work in the late 70s gained the attention of Xerox PARC, where Buxton
participated in pioneering research in collaborative work, interaction
techniques and ubiquitous computing (1987-1994). He then went on to become
Chief Scientist of SGI and Alias|Wavefront (1994/95-2002), where he had
the opportunity to work with some of the top filmmakers and industrial
designers in the world. In December 2005, was appointed principal researcher
at Microsoft Corp., where he splits his time between research, and helping
make design a fundamental pillar of the corporate culture. Prior to that,
he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting
firm, Buxton Design. Bio: www.billbuxton.com
(Microsoft Research) |
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Stuart Card Stuart Card is a Senior Research Fellow (since 2002) and the Area Manager of the User Interface Research group at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California. Card studied with Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, two Artificial Intelligence pioneers, in an interdisciplinary program in psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1974, he came to PARC to work with Allen Newell and Tom Moran on a project to build a practical supporting science for human computer interaction. His group developed, among others, theoretical characterizations of human–machine interaction, such as the Model Human Processor and the GOMS theory of user interaction. Card is a co-author of the book The Psychology of Human–Computer Interaction, which popularized these models. Furthermore, Card authored and co-edited a number of well-reveiced
books. His most recent books (from 2004), deal with the 3Book, a 3D interactive
visualization of a codex book. Card received the ACM CHI Lifetime Achievement
Award in 2000. Bio: Profile
in Interfaces No. 50, Spring 2002 (British HCI Group) |
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Larry Constantine
Beside being, together with Lucy Lockwood, principal of the consulting firm Constantine & Lockwood Ltd., Constantine is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Engineering at the University of Madeira, Funchal (Portugal) where he is also Director of LabUSE: the Laboratory for Usage-centered Software Engineering. He also served on the faculty of the University of Technology, Sydney (Australia), where he was Professor of Information Technology. Constantine is a prolific writer. Among his publications in both the
computer sciences and human sciences are over 150 articles and papers
plus 17 books, including Software for
Use (Addison-Wesley, 1999), written with Lucy Lockwood. Bio: www.foruse.com/about/principals.htm |
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Alan Cooper Many people, especially developers, know Alan Cooper as "the father of Visual Basic." Usability and user interface people will probably know him better as the "father of Goal-Directed® design," a design methodology that puts the user's needs first. On his company Website, Cooper describes his approach as follows: "Alan Cooper is a man with a mission. Outraged by the inferior and unusable products that are constantly forced upon long-suffering software users, Alan decided to do something about the problem. He founded Cooper Interaction Design in 1992 (now renamed to Cooper) with a clear mandate: to conceive and design interactive products that give power and pleasure to those who use them." Starting with SAP's Enjoy initiative, Cooper worked for SAP on a number of ambitious design and redesign projects. His co-workers also held courses on the Goal-Directed® design methodology at SAP. Cooper was also invited speaker of the German usability conference Software-Ergonomie '99, which was held at SAP AG, Walldorf in 1999. Alan Cooper's influential book About Face has become a "bible" for user interface designers as well as for many developers. In 2003, the new and in large parts rewritten About Face 2.0, co-authored by Robert Reimann, was published. Read also Cooper Interaction Design Enjoys SAP on the SAP Design Guild. Read his bio on the company Website: www.cooper.com/content/company/about_cooper.asp |
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Mary Czerwinski Mary Czerwinski is a Senior Researcher and manager of Microsoft's Visualization and Interaction (VIBE) Research Group group. Her research focuses primarily on novel information visualization and interaction techniques across a wide variety of display sizes. She also studies information worker task management, multitasking, and reminder systems. Before Microsoft, Czerwinski worked for Compac, Lockheed, and Bell. Czerwinski's background is in visual attention and user interface design. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington and still maintains ties to academia through an adjunct faculty position at the University of Washington. Czerwinski gave a presentation of her work at SAPLabs, Palo Alto in
April 2005. Feature Story: research.microsoft.com/news/featurestories/source/czerwinski.htm |
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Jonathan Grudin
Jonathan Grudin works in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group
at Microsoft Research, part of the Microsoft Corporation. His research
is in human-computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work,
with a particular focus on the design, adoption and use of group support
technologies. Some of his work was also done in the Collaborative and
Multimedia Systems Group. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, Grudin
was Professor of Information and Computer Science at University of California,
Irvine. Bio: research.microsoft.com/~jgrudin
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JoAnn Hackos JoAnn Hackos is a widely respected consultant on the management of
information development and information design, including product interfaces,
Web-based information, and documentation databases. She is also involved
in projects assessing customer needs related to product usability, technical
information, and training. For more than 20 years, Hackos has conducted
seminars internationally on subjects ranging from project management,
designing effective interfaces and information, minimal information products,
usability testing, online documentation and computer-based training,
to managing the information-design and -development process.
Hackos is president of Comtech, a Denver-based information design firm, which she founded together with Bill Hackos in 1978. She is also Director of the Center for Information-Development Management, a member-sponsored organization for information-development and training-management issues. Hackos wrote several well-received books – Content Management for Dynamic Web Delivery is the most recent one. She is also co-author of User and Task Analysis for Interface Design with Janice Redish. Hackos worked on several documentation-related projects for SAP; she
was also invited speaker of the German usability conference Software-Ergonomie
'99, which was held at SAP AG, Walldorf in 19999. Bio: www.comtech-serv.com/people.shtml |
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Karen Holtzblatt Karen Holtzblatt is best known for developing the Contextual Inquiry approach to gathering field data on product use. Together with Hugh Beyer, she founded InContext Enterprises, a consulting firm promoting the Contextual Design methodology, a "customer-centered approach to business by gathering customer data from the field and using it to drive the definition of a product or process, while supporting the needs of teams and their organizations". Holtzblatt sees herself as the visionary behind InContext's unique design approach: Her "combination of technological and psychological expertise provides the creative framework for transforming a marketplace with innovative designs." Holtzblatt and her company worked together with major players in the software industry, among others SAP. At SAP she was involved in key projects and taught her Contextual Design methodology in several courses. She has over 15 years of teaching experience both in industry and at the university. Karen Holtzblatt's influential book Contextual Design, co-authored by Hugh Beyer, is a "must" for user interface designers. Read the review of her book and Contextual Design at SAP on the SAP Design Guild. Read her bio on the company Website: www.incent.com/about/about.html |
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Sarah Horton Sarah Horton is a Web developer with Academic Computing at Dartmouth
College, where she helps faculties incorporate technology into their
teaching. Together with Patrick Lynch, she wrote the best-selling Web
Style Guide, recently released in its second edition. Her current
book, Access by Design,
applies the Universal Usability approach to Web design. Sarah regularly
writes about and speaks on accessible Web design. |
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Jeff Johnson
At CHI 2003 he appeared as the "evil designer" in the "CHI
Fringe" session and presented some highlights from his new book
Web Bloopers. Bio: www.uiwizards.com/aboutUs.html |
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Brenda Laurel Brenda Laurel sees herself as a designer, researcher and writer.
Her work focuses on interactive narrative, human-computer interaction,
and cultural aspects of technology. Her career in human-computer interaction
spans over twenty-five years.
Laurel has worked as a software designer, producer, and researcher for companies including Atari, Activision, and Apple. She serves currently as Chair and graduate faculty member of the graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Laurel has published extensively on topics including interactive fiction,
computer games, autonomous agents, virtual reality, and political and
artistic issues in interactive media. She is editor of the book, The
Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990) and author of Computers
as Theatre (1991; 2nd edition 1993), and a collection of essays entitled Severed
Heads. Recently, she edited the book Design Research (2003). Bio: www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/BrendaBio.html |
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Henry Lieberman
Henry Lieberman has been a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1987. (From 1972-87, he was a researcher at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.) His interests are in the intersection of artificial intelligence and the human interface. He directs the Software Agents group, which is concerned with making intelligent software that provides assistance to users in interactive interfaces. From 1987-1994 he worked with graphic designer Muriel Cooper on tools
for visual thinking, and new graphic metaphors for information visualization
and navigation. He is a pioneer of the the technique of Programming by
Example, where a user demonstrates examples, which are recorded and generalized
using techniques from machine learning. Bio: web.media.mit.edu/%7Elieber/Bio.Text |
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Aaron Marcus Aaron Marcus is the founder and President of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A), a Berkeley-based company that provides user-interface and information visualization design consulting for more than 20 years. Marcus' activities started in the late 60ies in the areas of computer graphics, desktop publishing, and virtual reality. Later, he taught at the University of Berkeley and was a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. One of his earliest projects after founding AM+M was an investigation in visualizing the C programming language more effectively. For the last decade, Marcus has turned his attention to Web, mobile, and vehicle user-interface and information-visualization design, training leaders for centers of excellence, providing guidelines for globalization/localization, and focusing on the challenges of "baby faces" (small displays for consumer information appliances) of ubiquitous devices and cross-cultural communication. Marcus has written over 150 articles and written/co-written five renowned
books. He has published, lectured, tutored, and consulted internationally
for more than 30 years and has been an invited keynote/plenary speaker
at many conferences. Bio: www.amanda.com/people/staff/aaron_marcus_f.html |
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Rolf Molich Rolf Molich owns and manages DialogDesign, a small Danish usability consultancy. He conceived of and coordinated the comparative usability evaluation studies CUE-1, CUE-2, CUE-3, and CUE-4, in which more than forty professional usability teams tested the same applications. Based on the results of these studies, he challenged the "Nielsen-Landauer-Law," which states that "five test persons are enough" to find most usability problems in an application – and initiated a lot of discussions at recent CHI conferences. (See CHI 2003 – New Horizons, But What Are They?) Molich has worked in usability since 1984, is the co-inventor (with
Jakob Nielsen) of the heuristic inspection method, and wrote the best-selling
Danish book, User Friendly Computer Systems, which has sold more
than 26,000 copies to date
Bio: User
Experience 2004 Conference (Speaker Biographies) |
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Jakob Nielsen According to the New York Times, Jakob Nielson is "The Guru of Web Page Usability;" further appellations can be found in the biography on this Website. He terms himself a "user advocate." Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. His famous statement, based on the Nielsen-Landauer model from 1993, "Five test persons are enough" has recently been discussed controversially in the HCI community. Nielsen authors the Alertbox column on Web usability, which is published on the Internet since 1995 and has a current readership of 10 million page views per year (Jakob Nielsen's Websitse: www.useit.com). He wrote a number of influential books, such as Usability Engineering and Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. His newest book Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed from 2001 presents more than 100 guidelines for better homepage design. Nielsen is principal of the Nielsen Norman Group (www.NNgroup.com)
which he co-founded with Donald A. Norman. Until 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems
Distinguished Engineer. Read his bio on the company Website: www.useit.com/jakob/index.html |
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Brad Myers
Brad A. Myers is a Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the principal investigator for the Pebbles Handheld Computer Project and the Natural Programming Project, and previously led the Amulet and Garnet projects. He is the author or editor of over 300 publications, including the books "Creating User Interfaces by Demonstration" and "Languages for Developing User Interfaces." Myers has been a consultant on user interface design and implementation
to over 60 companies, and regularly teaches courses on user interface
design and software. His research interests include user interface development
systems, user interfaces, handheld computers, programming environments,
programming language design, programming by example, visual programming,
interaction techniques, and window management. Bio: www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam |
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Don Norman Don Norman has a background in both engineering and the social sciences, with both academic and industrial experience. He is currently Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University and Professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is active as co-founder and principal of the Nielsen Norman group, happily engaged in advising numerous companies on products and services for consumers. He was an Apple Fellow and Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer, and an executive at Hewlett Packard and UNext (Cardean University), a distance education company. (From Don Norman's Website, adapted) Currently, Norman is working on "Emotional Design," which is also the title of his forthcoming book. He is developing a three-level theory of affect that has impacts on the design of "pleasurable" products. Norman received the ACM CHI (Computer Human Interaction) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. Don Norman's home page |
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Catherine Plaisant Catherine Plaisant is Associate Research Scientist at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. In 1987 she joined Professor Ben Shneiderman at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory of the University of Maryland. She works with graduate students and other members of the lab on designing and evaluating new interface technologies that are useable, useful, and appealing; with support from industry and government agencies. Plaisant's research contributions range from focused interaction techniques
to innovative visualization techniques validated with user studies and
practical applications. Recently, she published – together with
Ben Shneiderman – the 4th edition of the "classic" textbook
on UI design Designing the User Interface. Resume: www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/members/cplaisant/resume-11-8-2005.pdf |
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Jef Raskin According to his Website, "Jef Raskin is an interface and systems designer, a writer, and a consultant, concentrating primarily on making computers more usable and their interfaces efficient as well as pleasant. He is also well-known as an expert on the aerodynamics of miniature aircraft." Raskin's contributions to user interface design are numerous: He is best known for being the driving force in creating the Apple Macintosh user interface. He also created the Canon Cat, click-and-drag selection and other inventions. In addition, he coined the term and the concept of "information appliances." Raskin has written numerous articles and books. In 2000, he published
the book The Humane Interface,
which presents his vision of human interface design. Raskin says that "our
honeymoon with digital technology is over: We are tired of having to
learn huge, arcane programs to do even the simplest of tasks; we have
had our fill of crashing computers; and we are fatigued by the continual
pressure to upgrade. The Humane Interface delivers a way for computers,
information appliances, and other technology-driven products to continue
to advance in power and expand their range of applicability, while becoming
free of the hassles and obscurities that plague present products." Much to our regret we must inform you that Jef Raskin died on February 26th, 2005 at the age of nearly 62 (press release). Curriculum vitae: jef.raskincenter.org/home/curriculum_vitae.html |
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Eric Schaffer Eric Schaffer is the founder and CEO of Human Factors International, Inc. (HFI) (after ten years as president), a globally acting software usability company that is in the market since 1981 and called HFI since 1988. Currently, HFI has a staff of 175 professionals worldwide and is, according to the HFI Website, "the largest company in the field by a factor of more than five." Schaffer sees himself as a "visionary in software usability" and
in his job is "developing strategies and tools for institutionalization
of usability into large organizations." He "prefers work on
large mission-critical projects with tight time frames, high stakes,
and challenging human factors issues." Bio: www.humanfactors.com/about/eric.asp |
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Ben Shneiderman Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at the University of Maryland. His contributions to the user interface design field are numerous and diverse, such as hypertext systems, direct manipulation (a term that was coined by him), information visualization (starfield display, treemap, visible human, and many more...), and the design of large information-abundant Websites. Because of the extent and quality of his work, he received the ACM CHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. Shneiderman is the author of several books. His book Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction has become a "standard" for user interface designers. His vision of the future is presented in his October 2002 book Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (review). Shneiderman presents his new book as Keynote Speaker at several conferences in 2003, such as HCI International 2003, I-KNOW 2003, and CUU 2003. Ben Shneiderman's home
page |
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Robert Spence For over 40 years Bob Spence has pursued research in two fields, engineering
design and human-computer interaction. With colleagues, Spence has been
responsible for a number of innovations including the Bifocal Display
(now known as the Fisheye Lens), the Prosection Matrix and the Attribute,
Influence and Neighbourhood Explorers. His book, Information
Visualization (Addison-Wesley, 2001 and 2007) has been widely
adopted and forms the basis of many tutorials that Bob has given around
the world. Bio (homepage, Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering): www.iis.ee.ic.ac.uk/~r.spence |
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Jared Spool A software developer and programmer, Jared Spool founded User Interface Engineering, a research-driven company specializing in Website and product usability, in 1988. He has more than 15 years of experience conducting usability evaluations on a variety of products, and is an expert in low-fidelity prototyping techniques. Spool is a recognized authority on user interface design and human factors in computing. He is a regular tutorial speaker at the annual CHI conference and other conferences around the United States. Spool co-authored the influential book Web
Site Usability: A Designer's Guide, one of the first books
on Website design that was based on actual user data. He and his
company organize the annual User
Interface 8 Conference, which "has earned a reputation as
the best conference to learn advanced design techniques" in
the areas of information design, Web design and usability. Read his bio on the company Website: www.uie.com/about/consultants |
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Bruce Tognazzini Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini was Apple employee #66, has been designing software for more than 30 years, and holds nearly 50 US patents in computers and aviation. Tognazzini is a principal with the Nielsen Norman Group. He was lead designer at WebMD, a start-up founded in February, 1996 by Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Before that, Tog was Distinguished Engineer for Strategic Technology at Sun Microsystems. During his 14 years at Apple Computer, he founded the Apple Human Interface Group and acted as Apple's Human Interface Evangelist. Tognazzini has published two books, Tog on Interface and Tog
on Software Design, and was co-author as well as contributing
author of numerous other books. He has also published dozens of papers
and articles on computer design. He is currently publishing the free
webzine, "AskTog." Bio: www.asktog.com/tog.html |
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Gregg Vanderheiden Gregg Vanderheiden is a Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the university, he serves as Director of the Trace Research and Development Center, which focuses on making standard information technologies and telecommunications systems more accessible and usable by people with disabilities. Vanderheiden is responsible for a number of initiatives in this direction, particularly with respect to the Web. Vanderheiden has been working in the area of access to technology for over 30 years. His interests cover a wide range of research areas in technology, human disability, and aging. Current research includes development of new interface technologies, models for information transfer across sensory modalities, network-based services, techniques for augmenting human performance, enhancing the usability of the environment, and matching enhanced abilities to environmental demands. He also studies and develops standards for access to Web-based technologies, operating systems and telecommunication systems. In 2005, Vanderheiden received the ACM CHI Social Impact Award for his
work. Bio: www.engr.wisc.edu/ie/faculty/vanderheiden_gregg.html |
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Lynda Weinman Lynda Weinman is one of the most respected Web designers to date and has been "at the forefront of Web development from the early days of the explosion." Weinman wrote her first book on Web design in 1995, and has written more than a dozen since. Two well-known examples of her books are Designing Web Graphics.4 and Creative HTML Design.2. (She co-authors the latter with her brother Bill Weinman.) Her highly successful Ojai Training Center – Ojai is a small town in California – began as a solution to too much travel and provided a peaceful environment for growing up her daughter Jamie. Weinman claims that she is self taught and that she "simply learned the new technology and made it easy to understand" in her books and online tutorials. In an interview she says:
On her company Website,
she offers a large number of movies for online training, covering are
large variety of Web design topics. There, she also offer a plentiful free
tips and tutorials to the public. Read a feature of Lynda Weinman: webreference.com/graphics/greats/lynda |
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Terry Winograd Terry Winograd's focus is on human-computer interaction design, with a focus on the theoretical background and conceptual models. He directs the teaching programs in Human-Computer Interaction and HCI research in the Stanford Interactivity Lab. He is also a principal investigator in the Stanford Digital Libraries Project (from his home page). Winograd has become famous for his blocks world simulation program SHRDLU from the end of the Sixties. From that time on his major interest was in understanding natural language. Later his interest turned towards user interface design with a focus on theoretical models and design. Winograd promotes the idea of moving the user interface design community away from computer science and searching contact with professional design communities. Read the review of the book Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd.
Terry Winograd's home
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