Jeffrey was also one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool acquired by Google in 2006, where he managed the user experience group responsible for some of the largest web apps in the world. As a consultant, he has been involved in designing the leading blog and social media applications on the web, including Blogger, TypePad, Flickr, and and National Public Radio.

Previously, Jeffrey served as the Executive Director of Interface Design for Wired Digital and Lycos Inc., where he managed the look and feel of HotWired, the HotBot search engine, Lycos.com and others.

In addition to lecturing and writing on Web design and development, Jeffrey has been active with the World Wide Web Consortium’s CSS Editorial Review Board as an invited expert on electronic publishing. He was also an original columnist for Webmonkey, the author of the acclaimed books “The Art & Science of Web Design” and “HotWired Style: Principles for Building Smart Web Sites”.

Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL leading a range of community and personalization initiatives; Creative Director at AltaVista responsible for the AV Live portal and community tools and Chief Information Architect for Zip2 which produced a custom content management system for local city guides, entertainment guides, maps and yellow pages, including New York Today for the NYTimes.

She was the founding editor-in-chief of Boxes and Arrows, a role she served for 5 years. She is the author of several articles on interaction design history and design management and a founding member of the IA Institute. Erin has a BFA in Communication Design from East Carolina University (1986), Greenville NC and an MFA in Information Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology (1994), Rochester NY.

She is the author of the book Designing Social Interfaces with Christian Crumlish for O’Reilly Media and its related site designingsocialinterfaces.com.

Christian Crumlish has been living and working online since 1994. These days he is the curator of Yahoo!’s pattern library, a design evangelist with the Yahoo! Developer Network, and a member of Yahoo!’s Design Council. He is a director of the Information Architecture Institute and co-chair of the monthly BayCHI program.

He is the author of the bestselling The Internet for Busy People, and The Power of Many, and co-author most recently of Designing Social Interfaces with Erin Malone. He has spoken about social patterns at BarCamp Block, BayCHI, South by Southwest, the IA Summit, Ignite, Web 2.0 Expo, PLoP, IDEA, and Web Directions.

Nicole Lazzaro

Since founding XEODesign in 1992 Nicole’s design and research has improved over 40 million player experiences, including several popular franchises for casual audiences such as three of the Myst Series, Diner Dash, GoPets, Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover, Mavis Beacon teaches Typing, Jeopardy Online, as well as creativity coaching for the designers of The Sims.

Nicole was the first person to use facial expressions to measure player experiences. Through this research which she published in 2004 she discovered that people’s favorite player experiences (PX) craft emotion by offering choices in four play styles: the Hard Fun from challenge and mastery, Easy Fun from exploration and role play, Serious Fun for relaxation and real work, and People Fun from the excuse to hang out with friends. XEODesign’s PX model on emotion and games called the 4 Fun Keys inspires a wide range of creative approaches for crafting more emotions from play. With the 4 Fun Keys developers access player’s emotional response to innovate early in the development cycle where there is much less risk.

She is a passionate advocate for web content strategy and speaks regularly on the topic to audiences around the country. As founder and president of Brain Traffic, Kristina oversees the agency’s three core service offerings: web content strategy, information architecture, and writing for websites. She is the author of Content Strategy for the Web (New Riders Voices that Matter).

Julia Houck-Whitaker is the Research & Development Manager at Adaptive Path. She makes our R&D work happen including projects like Charmr. She also facilitates and manages the practitioners’ external speaking and writing engagements.

Before joining Adaptive Path, Julia was the Director of User Experience at Bolt | Peters, a longtime friend and strategic partner of Adaptive Path. While at Bolt | Peters, Julia oversaw their User Experience Consulting business. She managed and led qualitative and quantitative user-research projects for clients such as Oracle, Hallmark and Greenpeace.

Her interest and passion for User-Centered Design began while studying at UC San Diego, where she studied Human Computer Interaction. In addition to her studies, she worked on Distributed Cognition projects focusing on strategic planning in conjunction with the San Diego Super Computer.

Julia enjoys knitting, as well as training for and running marathons. She is also an avid fan of the Denver Broncos.

Peter Merholz is president and one of the founders of Adaptive Path. For more than six years, Peter has been instrumental in developing Adaptive Path’s ability to provide world-class consulting, training, and public events.

Peter’s work at Adaptive Path began with a focus on information architecture. Over time, he expanded his areas of expertise to include product strategy, user research and practice development, and in turn added these to the repertoire of services offered by Adaptive Path. Peter has worked with a wide variety of clients, from large multi-national companies to smaller, avant-garde firms and start-ups. Some of Peter’s past clients include Hallmark, Intel, Wells Fargo, United Airlines, and Vanguard Financial.

Internationally recognized as a thought leader on user experience, Peter’s blogs and his essays for Adaptive Path demonstrate his foresight on issues of information architecture, organizational change, and product strategy. Peter’s thought leadership is perhaps most dubiously demonstrated in his coining of the term “blog” in 1999 when it was a nascent genre. He is also the co-author of Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World.