Jeremy Ashley is Vice President of Applications User Experience at Oracle, USA. His global team of 120-plus professionals from Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Oracle, and Siebel has synthesized a set of best practices, technologies, and processes to optimize the user experience and usability of Enterprise Applications. This set will be applied to the next generation of Oracle Fusion enterprise applications, leveraging technologies including SOA, AJAX, and Web 2.0. Jeremy was formerly with Apple. He is a member of the CHI Design Management committee and a member of the Design Managers Institute. Formally trained as an Industrial designer, Jeremy’s educational background includes advanced degrees from the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London.

Sarah Bloomer has 20 years experience leading multi-disciplinary teams through a user-centered design process. She helps design customer research and translates findings into viable designs. She has presented at CHI, OzCHI, BayCHI, UPA, User Interface, and Interact. Back in 1991, Sarah co-founded The Hiser Group, Australia. She is now a Boston-based consultant.

A Microsoft veteran, Surya Vanka is Manager of User Experience Excellence, and oversees engineering standards to create Microsoft’s products that provide customers with a high-quality user experience. Design innovation happens daily at Microsoft. But with 600 design and user experience professionals spread across the company in groups from 2 to 30, it's up to Surya to capture these innovations and make them widely available. Surya's mission is to put the users rather than technology at the center of Microsoft’s product development process. Surya was professor of design at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a Fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study. He is the author of two books on design, has lectured on design in over 20 countries, and published widely. His work has appeared in Form, ID Magazine, WIRED, Interactions, BBC Radio, National Public Radio, Channel 15 Television, etc. He is the recipient of several awards including best practice awards at Microsoft, the accessibility achievement award, Alfred Sloan Foundation Award, and IDSA best paper award.

Bill Scott is Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo! where he spreads the goodness of "rich and sane" Ajax design and development. Bill was also Design Pattern curator and launched the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. Earlier, Bill led User Experience at Sabre Airline Solutions and co-founded Rico (an open source Ajax framework). For 20 years, Bill has bounced back and forth between design and engineering projects, creating products in areas like video games, widget libraries, war gaming, IDE tools, airline management, and Web consumer sites. Bill is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops discussing the nuances of good design and the challenges of great engineering. His musings can be found at http://looksgoodworkswell.com.

Software professionals, web designers, HCI professionals, and technical writers from companies including the following participated

Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a firm that brings together user research, design and business strategy. Portigal Consulting helps clients to discover and act on new insights about how their customers work, play, shop, entertain, eat, and live their lives around products and services.

In addition to regularly speaking at design and marketing events, Steve contributes to several blogs and writes FreshMeat, a semi-regular email column about the relationships between business, culture, technology, products, and consumers. Steve received an MSc in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Guelph and early in his career worked as a user-interface designer for technology companies such as Tandem and Northern Telecom. He is an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Grocery Products in his home.

Deepa Bachu is a Senior Manager at INTUIT Technologies, makers of Quicken, TurboTax, QuickBooks and other intuitive products. Intuit uses Customer Driven Innovation (CDI) to create new offerings and improve upon existing ones – start with identifying customer needs and then build solutions that really meet those customer needs. Deepa has 11+ years in the User Experience field.

Software professionals, web designers, HCI professionals, and technical writers from companies including the following participated

Marc Rettig consults in customer research, product strategy, and interaction and interface design. Recently his clients have included BBC, Cisco and Microsoft, as well as advertising agencies and a medical software start-up. Marc also teaches interaction design. Most recently he completed a term as the 2003 Nierenberg Chair of Design in the Graduate School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, and he served as an adjunct professor at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology.

Jenna Date is an interaction designer at Maya Viz, a company that creates visualization, collaboration, and decision-support software. Earlier, Jenna was an Interface Design Lead at Siemens. Jenna received her Masters Degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University.

Software professionals, web designers, HCI professionals, and technical writers from companies including the following participated.

Aaron Marcus is the founder and President of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc, USA. Aaron holds graduate degrees from Princeton and Yale Universities. He has earlier worked at AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton University, and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Aaron has written over one hundred and fifty articles! He has also written or co-written five books, including The Cross-GUI Handbook for Multiplatform User Interface Design. Aaron is on the editorial boards of two of the world's most important usability magazines: Interactions by ACM SIGCHI and User Experience by Usability Professionals Association.

Aaron is now focused on the Web, mobile devices, and vehicles, helping the industry to learn about good user-interface and information-visualization design, and providing guidelines for globalization/localization. Aaron has been professionally active for more than 30 years and has been an invited speaker at HCI conferences around the world. In 1992, Aaron received an award for contributions to industry.

Richard Anderson is an internationally-recognized Usability consultant and instructor. He provides guidance and direction to businesses in the user-centered design area. Richard founded the user experience centers at Studio Archetype, Sapient, and Viant. Richard is presently the Program Chair for DUX 2003, the first conference on Designing for User Experiences. Richard's academic background includes Doctoral work in educational psychology and a Masters degree in computer science.

Andy Smith is Director of Optimum-Web Ltd, which is based in London. At the University of Luton, he leads the HCI research unit and Centre for Software Internationalization. Andy is an Executive Committee Member of the British HCI Group. He is also Co-convener of the Indo British Software Usability partnership.

Joseph Konstan, PhD: An Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA, Joe is ACM lecturer, SIGCHI Bulletin editor, and exec committee member of ACM SIGCHI. He is also co-founder of Net Perceptions, Inc.

• NovellSAP Labs
• Digital
• Verifone
• Tata Infotech
• CBSI
• Pramati Technologies
• Sasken Communication
• Aspect Development
• NetKraft
• 3rd Agenda
• Sun Microsystems
• Cisco Systems
• TCS
• i-flex solutions
• Cognizant

• Aztec Software
• SallieMae Solutions
• Infotech Enterprises
• Write Concept
• SignDesign
• Motorola
• Honeywell
• HCL Technologies
• Infosys
• Satyam Infoway
• DE Shaw
• IIC Technologies
• Triumph
• Avigna Technologies
• Impulsesoft