UXPA Chapter Meeting: Past, Present & Future of UX

Light Appetizers and non alcoholic drinks will be served before the panel

Past Present and Future of UX

The theme of the panel discussion is the Past, Present and Future of UX. We plan on covering the following three questions and appreciate suggestions for additional questions:

What were the major trends in UX when you started your careers? What are today's trends in UX and which companies are doing a particularly good job of staying on top of them? What UX trends will we see in the future, and what should UXers be doing now to prepare themselves for these trends? Panelists:

Ian Swinson is a senior director of user experience for the Platform and Analytics design teams at Salesforce.com. He has spent the last nineteen years solving design problems at startups, design studios, and enterprise software companies. Ian is a graduate of McGill University’s Film and Communications program. Larry Tesler has more than fifty years experience working as an engineering and user experience professional. He’s worked as a hiring manager at several companies including Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!. Over the course of his career, he has hired hundreds of people with at least one UX-related skill, dozens who had several. Sara Ortloff Khoury is the VP of user experience, insights, and analytics for Walmart Global eCommerce. She leads multidisciplinary teams to deliver customer experience solutions across web, kiosk, mobile, and television platforms. She holds a B.F.A. in Design from Pratt Institute and an M.F.A. in Design from Art Center College of Design. Fred Gilbert is the Director of Design for Google's Social product area which includes Google+.

At Google, Fred has been part of the mobile revolution by being one of the original designers behind Google Maps for Mobile, Latitude, Navigation, and Messenger. He built the Google+ Mobile and Real Time Communications teams (Hangouts, chat and more). He was the first to acquire a design firm to bolster Google's visual design capabilities which led to the formation of the Google+ Alliance for Spit and Polish (GASP). Through Google+ and GASP Fred is pushing the boundaries of Google design.

Fred's background spans design, development, management, teaching and research.

Facilitator: Irene Au is VP of Product and Design at Udacity, a startup dedicated to bringing higher education online and making it accessible and affordable to everyone. Irene has employed several hundreds of user experience professionals, as she formerly headed Google’s entire User Experience team for six years and built and ran Yahoo’s User Experience and Design team for eight years prior to that. She also holds certificates from two highly acclaimed yoga teacher training programs and teaches yoga.