Rapidfire round: 5-minute talks from each workshop leader

Giles Colborne co-founded cxpartners in 2004. Since then, it has grown to become an international consultancy which works with global companies to create web and mobile user experiences thatmake a measurable difference to their bottom line and their customers’ lives. His book, Simple and Usable, is a bestseller in the US, UK and China.

Giles' career in usability and user centred design began in 1991 at British Aerospace before moving to Institute of Physics Publishing where he created some of the first commercial online publications. He then went on to Havas where he led work on some notable sites such as the Euro 96, the first major sports tournament on the Web, Peugeot’s online car sales programme and a global user research programme for Intel.

Giles is actively involved in the community — most recently as co-chair of IA Summit 2013 — and is a former President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association. Additionally, he has worked with the British Standards Institute in developing guidance on web accessibility.

Dana strives to counter bad data every day. She's a research nerd (her words) who just loves methodology, collaborating, and data — especially data she can help teams use to make design decisions. In fact, Dana loves applied research so much that just for fun, she sometimes organizes clients, friends, and other nerds to do flash research on the weekends!

Dana believes in ending the opinion wars. And she has helped dozens of teams at organizations large and small find peaceful cooperation as they gather and analyze user research data to inform designs from software, to websites, to apps, to voting systems.

She’s what you might call a “seasoned professional” who, with Jeff Rubin, wrote Handbook of Usability Testing, Second Edition.

A product management and user experience strategy consultant, advisor, speaker, and educator by day, rockstar by night (phew!), Donna specializes in mobile, tablet, responsive web, and mobile first product strategy. Simply put, she gets the best results helping teams think big by starting small.

Donna has worked with a variety of businesses around the world, from startups to nonprofits to established Fortune 500 companies such as Seamless, Citi, Bloomberg, Apartment Therapy, WNYC, Atlantic Records, The New School, and Nerve.com.

She is on the adjunct faculty at Parsons School of Design and NYU in New York City. Perhaps one day we’ll even see her teaching at Hogwarts. For now, we’re ecstatic that she’ll be speaking at Fluxible 2014.

Alex Tam is a Principal Designer at healthcare startup Practice Fusion. He has spent most of his career focused on healthcare, designing solutions for tens of millions of patients and providers.

After graduating from Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, he worked as an interaction designer at Quarry. He then went on to work in hospital systems throughout Ontario and around the world with the renowned design firm, Frog. He's designed a management system for chronic patients going through clinical trials in Australia, and authored a chapter on gamification in healthcare.

Alex focuses much of his efforts on rapid ideation. Through winning a series of hackathons, he's demonstrated how prototyping with multi-disciplinary teams can lead to compelling concepts with high impact. Alex loves to bring to life products that people enjoy using.

Team Fluxible is proud to welcome Alex back home for a visit to Waterloo Region!

Indi is a trailblazer in user experience, exploring uncharted territories and advancing the discipline in areas not wholly discovered previously. In 2001, when most companies were closing their doors, Indi decided to open one by co-founding the world-class UX agency Adaptive Path, which continues to provide leadership for our field even today. She is an expert consultant in user experience, offering her experience in research, strategy, and redesign to organizations around the world.

After 5 fabulously productive years at Adaptive Path, Indi left to try something new once again. She authored Mental Models, a book on design strategy published by Rosenfeld Media in 2008. This year, look for her next masterpiece, titled Practical Empathy.

Indi has presented about empathy and user experience strategy at more than 35 conferences and local meetings. We’re so excited to add Fluxible to that list!