The Biggest and Most Authoritative Library of Open-Source UX Design Resources

Don Norman is widely regarded as the creator of the term “UX design.” An expert in design, usability, and cognitive science, Norman strongly advocated for user-centered design, which now underpins almost all design fields. His ideas on aesthetics, affordances, and usability profoundly impact the way we design everything, from doors to software applications.

In 1993, he joined Apple as a User Experience Architect—the first-ever use of the phrase “user experience” in a job title. Norman’s books, The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design, are regarded as essential readings for any design student. He is currently director of The Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, and is also co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.

Don Norman is the author of numerous books including "Emotional Design," and more recently, "Living with Complexity." He is co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, a professor at KAIST (in Korea), an IDEO fellow, and a design theorist, studying the fundamentals of modern design.

Donald A. Norman has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from MIT and a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds an honorary degree from the University of Padua, Italy. He has been a professor of Computer Science (at Northwestern University), Psychology, and Cognitive Science (at the University of California, San Diego).

Recognized as a leader in the design community, Karen has pioneered transformative ideas and design approaches throughout her career. Karen is the inventor of Contextual Inquiry-the industry standard for gathering field data to understand how technology impacts the way people work. Contextual Inquiry and the design processes based on it provide a revolutionary approach for designing new products and systems based on a deep understanding of the context of use. Contextual Inquiry forms the base of Contextual Design, InContext's full customer-centered design process.

Karen co-founded InContext Enterprises in 1992 to use Contextual Design techniques to coach product teams and deliver customer-centered designs to businesses across multiple industries. The books, Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems, and Rapid Contextual Design, are used by companies and universities all over the world. Karen is a member of the CHI Academy (awarded to significant contributors in the Computer-Human Interaction Association) and received the first Life Time Award for Practice at CHI2010 for her contributions to the field. Karen's extensive experience with teams and all types of work and life practice underlies the innovation and reliable quality consistently delivered by InContext's teams.

Karen also has more than 20 years of teaching experience, professionally and in university settings. She holds a doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto.

Ann Blandford is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at University College London and served as Director of UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC) (2004-2011). Her teaching includes User-Centred Evaluation Methods on the MSc in HCI with Ergonomics at UCL. She started her career in industry, as a software engineer, but soon moved into academia, where she developed a focus on the use and usability of computer systems. Ann leads research projects on human error and on interacting with information, with a focus on modeling situated interactions. In particular, she leads an EPSRC Platform Grant on Interactive Systems in Healthcare, and an EPSRC Programme Grant, CHI+MED, on Human-Computer Interaction for Medical Devices. She has been technical program chair for several conferences, the most recent being NordiCHI 2010. See http://www.ucl.ac.uk/uclic/people/a_blandford/ for more detail.

Lene Nielsen is an Associate Professor at ITU, Department of Business IT, and Head of the TIME (Technology, Innovation, Management, and Entrepreneurship) research group.

Her research focuses on personas, and she was the first in the world to write a Ph.D. about personas. Her research topics include the many aspects of the development and use of personas, such as:

• Global personas

• Personas based on quantitative data

• Persona descriptions as communication to specific and different audiences

• The relationship between persona description and data

• The use of personas in agile development

• Personas in service design.

Lene Nielsen har published two books on personas and more than 80 papers

Lene Nielsen teaches service design and different aspects of innovation.

Frank Spillers is a web and software usability expert, a distinguished speaker, author, and internationally respected Senior Usability practitioner. He is an expert in improving the design and usability of large-scale websites, web applications, desktop, and mobile apps. He is the founder of the usability consultancy firm Experience Dynamics. With an MSc in Cognitive Science and eleven years of experience in UX design, Spillers has worked with clients such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Microsoft. He is an experienced practitioner of user-centered and emotional design and has developed a new research technique called “cognitive archeology,” which aids experts when researching emotional product design.

Before founding Experience Dynamics in 2001, Frank managed usability consulting for WebCriteria (now Coremetrics) and worked with students of Dr. Donald Norman (the grandfather of User-Centered Design) at Intuitive Design, a San Diego-based User-Centered Design consultancy. His current clients include Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Logitech, GE, Nike, Hewlett-Packard, KeyBank, Four Seasons, Chase, Target.com, and Whitepages.com. He has trained thousands of teams and individuals in usability and User-Centered Design techniques in private as well as public settings.

Frank received his Master's in Cognitive Science (MS) from Birmingham University, the UK in the user experience of collaborative (social) virtual (3D) environments.

Alan Dix is a computing professor at the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Centre of the University of Birmingham, UK. He is a co-author of the global, bestselling university-level textbook Human-Computer Interaction. Dix is passionate about designing things that connect humans and computers—everything from machines to software. He has co-authored and published hundreds of papers on HCI, covering topics ranging from information visualization and usability to designing for appropriation.

Alan Dix has taught and researched human-computer interaction (HCI) for nearly 30 years. His interests in the area range from the application of formal techniques in interface design to methods for enhancing innovation and creativity. He began as a mathematician at Cambridge University and moved into computing and HCI whilst doing his Ph.D. at the University of York. His background also includes work on farm crop sprayers and remote-controlled submarines. He was one of the founder-director of two Internet dot.com companies.