Birte Koerber is Director Quality Management at SirValUse Consulting (Germany), one of the largest user experience research and testing companies in Europe. In her current role she is responsible for qualifying the company staff with training and individual coaching as well as ensuring the overall quality of the project work and processes. In her former role as Director Customer Experience, she led a team of consultants and was account manager for SirValUse’s clients from the e-commerce and healthcare/pharmaceutical sector as well as for design agency clients. Over the years she led numerous research projects on a global level. Birte actively contributes to the UXAlliance by working on quality standards in the quality interest group. She has a background in Web design and was responsible for building the user interface of Infoseek Germany (a search engine and portal) before joining SirValUse in 2002.

Florian is the Founder and Principal of Telono, a Swiss user experience consultancy. He has worked on a range of usability projects, from mobile operators and finance to information portals for the United Nations. He specialises in strategic customer experience design and evaluation, taking into account on- and offline touch points between a company and its clientele.

Florian's academic background is in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), with a Master's from University College London and a PhD from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. The title of his PhD thesis was "From Interactions to Transactions: Designing the Trust Experience for Business-to-Consumer Electronic Commerce".

Frederic Gaillard is founder and principal of Axance, the leading French firm specializing in user experience design for digital services. Today, Frederic is helping Axance’s clients at implementing a user centered strategy, but in his former role he was responsible of the international research and has provided research and design consulting for more than 150 online services since 1999.

Before founding Axance, Frederic was a design consultant at various companies with a special interest to end users. He has a passion for human computer interaction and technology adoption. Frederic is also one of the founding member of the UXalliance (the global leader in UX and user research) and takes care of the partners relations into this growing group.

Frederic holds a diploma in industrial design, a MSc in Management and a BSc in Art History from La Sorbonne, Paris.

As one of User Centric’s founders, Gavin has been instrumental in shaping User Centric as the premier firm in the US user experience market. Gavin’s 15+ years of experience in corporate and academic environments have given him a strong foundation in user-centered design and evaluation. In addition to managing the company, he holds particular interest in mobile technology, healthcare, and global research projects. Prior to co-founding User Centric, Gavin was president of a funded Internet start-up, principal at a web development company, a member of Ameritech's Human Factors group, and Director at another user experience research consulting firm. He is a frequent presenter at national and international conferences and the lead inventor on several patents. Gavin is also an adjunct faculty member at DePaul University in user experience research with the College of Computing and Digital Media.

Joëlle Stemp is an associate and President at Yu Centrik. With a background in communications, she started her career as a user interface designer and has been for the past 20 years. For five years she was part of a User Interface Research Team at Montreal Computer Research Center (CRIM). She is also an HFI’s Certified Usability Analyst.

She has participated in several large public projects and she is a pioneer of the Web. She design user-interface for Minitel in France in early 1980 and then designed the first (CWIS) Campus Wide Information System on Internet at University of Montreal, Canada in 1990. Since then, she has acquired a solid expertise in designing and evaluation interactive products, from websites to itv applications, from user research to remote usability testing.

Her strong passion for usability lead her, in 2003, to start Yu Centrik, a Montreal firm an independent firm highly specialized in the field of user experience.

Reva Glassman is a Usability Team Director at Mitsue-Links, the first and largest information integrator in Japan. She is originally from the United States, where she earned her BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and earned her JD from UCLA School of Law, shortly afterwards becoming a licensed attorney in the state of California. She has been living in Tokyo for the past two years, and is currently in charge of foreign communication and business development for the Usability Team. As the sole American at a Japanese company, she is relied upon to investigate and interpret all aspects of usability theory and practice as pertains to Mitsue-Links foreign business relations. Her current interests involve reconciling the differences in practice between Japan and the international community on all levels, but particularly in the areas of estimation, screeners, recruiting, pricing, reporting, and privacy documents.

Robert M. Schumacher is Managing Director at User Centric, Inc., a leading global user research firm headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Bob is well known for his experience and expertise in global user research. He is the editor of the recently released "Handbook of Global User Research" published by Morgan Kaufman. In this volume, he coordinated the contributions of 53 authors from more than 20 countries. He has been invited to speak on user experience and user research at national and international conferences in North America, Europe and Asia. Bob has served as research director for dozens of global user research projects.

More recently, Bob has been become influential in how usability is applied to health information technologies. He has authored several papers on usability criteria in the EHR selection process. Most recently he has been project lead in the development of a usability assessment protocol for the usability of electronic health records. He has also conducted research and published several studies on the usability of and factors affecting adoption of PHRs. Under his management, User Centric conducts dozens of health care user experience research and design projects a year. Bob also serves on the US National Research Council's Committee on Human Factors in Home Healthcare.

In more than 20 years of professional experience, Bob has held technical and management positions at Bellcore, Ameritech, Belgacom, Universal Access, and User Centric. Bob holds a PhD in Cognitive and Experimental Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Shailesh has a passion for tackling complex problems (no doubt from his background as a physicist). He is skilled at helping organisations structure themselves and execute on projects to deliver world-class customer experiences. Shailesh’s role as a Director of Optimal Usability connects him to many international usability and customer experience professionals. This broad knowledge allows Shailesh to challenge and extend New Zealand clients in the area of customer experience at both a strategic and project level.

Shailesh’s recent activities are focused on speaking at conferences, helping clients develop strategies that are customer focused, building up UX teams and incorporating service design into organisations. He also struggles to leave projects alone and most recently enjoyed working on the customer testing phases of the Air New Zealand Sky Couch project.

Simon Herd is Managing Consultant at ExperienceLab (formerly Serco Usability Services), which was identified by Forrester as Europe’s most experienced usability vendor. Simon is one of the most experienced usability professionals in the UK and has been active in user experience research for more than 15 years. He has led complex international and E-government projects for more than a decade. More recently, Simon has led ExperienceLab projects for the UK Transformational Government programme.

Before joining ExperienceLab, Simon was an HCI Professional at the communications company NTL and NatWest Bank. Simon holds an MSc in Human Factors and Information Technology from Loughborough University. ExperienceLab is a founding partner of the UXalliance.

Thomas is one of Denmark’s leading usability specialists. He has 10 years experience in the industry from usability studies for national and international companies.

Thomas is a frequent speaker at Danish and international conferences and is the blogger at Computerworld.

He founded in 2005 Snitker & Co. and is the author of two books, “Breaking Through to the Other Side - using the User Experience in Web, interactive television and mobile services” (2004) and “Using the users - and create more user-friendly websites.” (in Danish, 2001). He contributed to the “Handbook of Global User Research” (2009, ed. Robert Schumacher.)

Tjeerd founded User Intelligence in 2002. From that point, this User Experience consultancy firm has grown to a team of nearly 20 people. The company focuses on the Research, Design and Optimization of interactive products and operates in the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and Norway.

The combination of people, business and interactive technology is of special interest to Tjeerd. Prior to starting User Intelligence, he worked at Razorfish, Amsterdam and the Technical University, Eindhoven. This gives him an experience of 10+ years in User Experience Design. During these years, Tjeerd has worked for a variety of organizations, both in terms of size and industry.

In addition to managing the company, Tjeerd is treasurer of Chi Nederland (the local chapter of ACM SIGCHI). In this position, he has organised many UX conferences in the Netherlands over the last 10 years. Tjeerd is member of the Usability Professionals Association and the Web Analytics Association.

Trent Mankelow is the co-founder and CEO of Optimal Usability, New Zealand’s leading usability consultancy company. Since 2002 Optimal Usability has observed over 4,500 people interacting with all sorts of touchpoints, including websites, paper forms, kiosks, websites and IVR systems. Trent regularly speaks on customer experience, self-service and usability. He is on the international board of the Usability Professionals’ Association.