Bill Buxton is a relentless advocate for innovation, design, and - especially - the appropriate consideration of human values, capacity, and culture in the conception, implementation, and use of new products and technologies. This is reflected in his research, teaching, talks, and writing - including his column on design and innovation for BusinessWeek.com, and his 2007 book, Sketching User Experiences.

In December 2005, he was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm, Buxton Design.

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: Design for Discovery, was 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 user experience strategy 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

Jesse James Garrett is co-founder and president of Adaptive Path, a user experience design consultancy. His contributions to the field of user experience include creating the seminal "Elements of User Experience" model; developing the Visual Vocabulary, a notation system for documenting user experience design; and defining Ajax, an approach to creating Web applications.

Jesse has received Wired Magazine's Rave Award for Technology and has been named one of the "50 Most Important People on the Web" by PC World. His client work includes engagements for Twitter, NPR, Skype, Harvard Business Review, and Crayola. He is a frequent keynote speaker addressing audiences around the world on product design, user experience, and innovation.

Janice (Ginny) Redish helps clients and colleagues with content strategy, writing for the web, plain language, and other aspects of UX. Ginny's latest book, Letting Go of the Words – Writing Web Content that Works, gets raves from Amazon reviewers and blog writers. Ginny is also co-author of two of the classic books on usability techniques and has been called the "mother of usability" (UPA Voice, June 2005). She is a dynamic speaker, sought after for workshops and conferences.

Ginny has keynoted conferences in 8 countries and has trained thousands of UX colleagues, writers, designers, developers, and subject matter specialists on 4 continents. Visit Ginny's web site and download two chapters of Letting Go: www.redish.net

Dave Gray is the Founder of XPLANE, the visual thinking company, and a Partner in the Dachis Group, a social business consultancy. Dave's time is spent researching, sketching and writing on innovation, design, systems thinking, and creativity in business, as well as speaking, coaching and delivering workshops to educators, corporate clients and the public.

His latest book, "Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers" details more than 80 tools and techniques used by the world's leading innovators. He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.

Kim Goodwin is the author of the bestselling book, Designing for the Digital Age. Kim spent most of the last decade as Vice-President, Design and General Manager at Cooper, leading an integrated practice of interaction, visual, and industrial designers, as well as the development of the acclaimed Cooper U design curriculum.

Previously, she was an in-house creative director. Kim is currently consulting with a variety of clients on integrating design into their organizations.

Mike Kuniavsky is a designer, writer, researcher, consultant and entrepreneur focused on people's relationship to digital technology. He cofounded Adaptive Path and ThingM, a ubiquitous computing design studio and micro-manufacturer.

He is the author of Observing the User Experience, a popular textbook of user research methods, and Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design, a guide to the user-centered design of digital products.

Indi Young got her start as a software engineer designing interactive models and compilers on supercomputers. When she switched to personal hand-held devices (the PenPoint & Newton age), it became overwhelmingly evident that engineers were creating apps for fellow engineers. Someone needed to be able to understand the non-engineers who were trying to make their days go more smoothly. This is when she learned how to listen deeply to people and find out what they are thinking. Shortly thereafter, she created mental model diagrams so businesses could capitalize upon this data.

One of the founders of Adaptive Path and the first Rosenfeld Media author, Indi gives energy to the growing interaction design and experience strategy communities. Her work is available on Slideshare and on her book site at www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models.

Joshua Porter is the Director of UX at HubSpot, based in Boston, MA. There he leads an amazing team of designers, researchers, and content folks who help build all-in-one software for professional marketers. Josh has been designing interfaces for over a decade. His book Designing for the Social Web was the first book to take social interaction design seriously. Through his blog Bokardo.com, Josh is widely recognized as one of the industry's thought leaders, explaining difficult design concepts in easy ways.

He also co-founded the popular blog 52weeksofUX.com. Josh's upcoming book "Make them Care!" helps designers and UX professionals make people care about their product or service. It's going to rock.

Rachel Hinman is a researcher, designer and a recognized thought leader in the mobile user experience field. Her passion for cultural study, art, and design coupled with the belief that people can use technology to improve the human condition have been the driving forces in her career for over a decade.

Currently, Rachel is a Senior Research Scientist at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California. There she focuses on the research and design of emergent and experimental mobile interfaces and mobile experiences for emerging markets.

Gerry is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords. He is widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on helping large organizations create more customer-focused websites. This is achieved through a unique management model that Gerry has developed called Top Task Management.

Gerry has spoken, written and consulted extensively on web content management issues since 1994. His new book, The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online, was published in 2010.

Arnie Lund has managed user experience teams at several of the leading companies in the industry, and has a passion for management and for driving innovation in design and user research practices. He is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy, and received the SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2011. He co-chaired the CHI conferences in 1998 (Los Angeles, US) and 2008 (Florence, Italy), and served on the HFES Executive Council where he oversaw human-computer interaction standards activities. He has also served as president of the board of directors for the Board of Certification in Professional Ergonomics (BCPE), and on the board of directors for INFINITEC (focusing on infinite potential through assistive technologies).

Arnie's book User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams (Morgan Kaufmann) was published in 2011, and he has published widely on R&D management. You can follow his tweets @arnielund.

Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a bite-sized Bay Area firm that helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers. In the past 15 years, Steve has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories.

Steve writes regularly on topics from interaction design to pop culture for interactions, Core77, Ambidextrous, Johnny Holland, and the Portigal Consulting blog All This ChittahChattah. He is an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Groceries in his home.

Deb Gelman has been involved with kids and media since 1993. After earning bachelors' degrees in visual media and psychology from American University in Washington, DC, Deb worked in children's television, creating educational programming for elementary-school kids. She moved into interactive media in the late 90s, studying information design and technology at Georgia Tech. Her masters' thesis, and subsequent work, focused on using virtual worlds to teach kids about environmental science.

Since that time, Deb has been designing kids' websites and software for companies including Crayola, PBS Sprout, Scholastic, The Campbell's Soup Company, ING Direct and Comcast. Deb currently works as UX Studio Manager at Comcast Interactive Media in Philadelphia, PA. She is the author of Design for Kids: A Framework for Digital Experiences to be published by Rosenfeld Media in 2012.

Cennydd Bowles is a digital product designer and writer based in Brighton, UK.

Cennydd has nearly a decade of experience advising clients including WWF, Samsung, ITV, The Open University and Gumtree on the benefits of customer-focused design. He speaks at design and user experience conferences across the globe. He writes for his popular blog and influential design publications, and is author of the book Undercover User Experience Design. His second book, Designing the Wider Web, will be published this winter.

Derek Featherstone is an internationally-known author, speaker and authority on accessibility and web development. He is the founder of Further Ahead, a leading firm that delivers insightful and creative accessibility consulting to Fortune 500 corporations, educational institutions, public utilities, government agencies and other private sector clients.

He writes a lot about accessibility at SimplyAccessible.com

Nate is the co-founder and president of Bolt | Peters, co-author of Remote Research, designer of Ethnio, and animator of dinosaurs explaining information architecture. After creating and directing the User Experience department at Clear Ink in 1999, which included the construction of Natural Environment and Remote Observation laboratories, Nate began working with the team at B|P to conduct hundreds of UX research and design projects for Sony, Oracle, HP, Greenpeace, Electronic Arts, and others.

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.

Jeff Gothelf has spent a 14 year career as an interaction designer, Agile practitioner, user experience team leader and blogger. He is one of the leading voices on the topic of Agile UX and Lean UX. In addition, Jeff is the author of the upcoming O'Reilly book (2012), Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business. Jeff has led cross-functional product design teams at TheLadders, Publicis Modem, WebTrends, Fidelity, and AOL while maintaining a strong advisory and mentorship presence in the startup communities of New York City and Silicon Valley.

He has recently launched Proof, a product design and innovation studio that combines lean processes with strategy, design and technology.

Andrea is a researcher and teacher at the University of Borås, Sweden, and an information architect with FatDUX, a UX firm with headquarters in Copenhagen. Architect and designer, and a practicing information architect since 1999, Andrea holds a PhD in Legal Informatics and is currently President of the Information Architecture Institute.

Andrea pretends to play the piano, reads far too many books, chairs the Italian IA Summit, and co-founded the Journal of Information Architecture. His book Pervasive Information Architecture, co-authored with Luca Rosati, was published by Morgan Kauffman in 2011.