The stars of the show

Phil Hesketh

Phil has been involved in design for over a decade, and spent the last 5 years doing service design and research for organisations like the Co-op and FutureGov here in Manchester in the UK.  

He finished a masters at Hyper Island in 2016 where he became interested in and wrote his thesis on ethics in the design process and specifically what that might mean from a very practical and hands-on perspective.

That work turned into Ethics Kit, which in turn led him to become really interested in informed consent, and ultimately to build a product called Consent Kit last year. 

Youp van Veen

Youp is a Netherlands-based UX researcher who loves what he does: bringing people, services and technology together in a sustainable way. It is an ultimate combination of his background in cognitive psychology with his interest in (digital) systems. Soon he’ll start working as a UX Researcher for Squla, to contribute to their mission to make education fun.

“Since entering the field of UX I’ve always liked to be part of the community. Whether it is attending a meetup, presenting there, or helping people online. I hope to meet you during this year’s festival!”

Melody David (host)

Melody is passionate about creating inclusive user experiences driven by research & data. In recent years, she has hosted and spoken at several events and organisations including Uber, Facebook, UXDX Amsterdam, Women in Tech Regatta and The Next Web Amsterdam.

She is on a personal mission to empower women and queer people of colour to speak on the subjects they know and love.

Bindu Upadhyay

Bindu is passionate about people, their behaviour, and the ecosystems in which they interact.

At Mendix, as a Service Designer, she brings in a holistic and collaborative approach to product design and development. She confesses that leveraging the knowledge of a multidisciplinary team has led to successful projects.

Having moved from India to the Netherlands, she feels that diversity alone doesn’t lead to inclusion and is always up for a conversation around this topic.

Say hi on twitter at @UpadhyayBindu

Nidhi Jalwal (host)

Nidhi is part of the Global UX team at Adidas to make sure that the user is an integral part of the equation. She has learned from and worked with various communities across countries.

Fairly new to the Netherlands, she was looking to connect to the larger UX Research community. She is a researcher who enjoys organising events.

“Being part of the UX Insight team allows me to pursue both, so here I am!”

Caroline Jarrett

Caroline is the forms specialist. She founded her business Effortmark Ltd in 1994 to allow her to concentrate on helping organisations to make their forms easier to fill in and to make business
processes more effective.

Farai Madzima

Farai Madzima is a UX Lead at Shopify in Ottawa. He’s an interaction designer and organiser of Pixel Up! meetups and conferences. 
In South Africa, Farai designed banking apps used by many across the continent.  He grappled with unique design challenges because most internet users have never used a laptop or desktop. And some buy data by the megabyte. 

Farai likes words in all languages, township jazz, nerdy hip-hop, and the number 127. 

Beant Kaur Dhillon

Beant is a Senior User Researcher and Usability Consultant with ~10 years experience. She is also an artist for the last 8 years. Having worked with the likes of Philips, Adidas and Ultimaker, as well as many medical start-up companies, Beant has led end-to end-user research projects on a broad range of products, systems and apps, across the globe.

Beant also trains and assists companies to set-up user research and user-centered design processes. She conducts workshops on Creative Thinking and writes altUXR – a bi-monthly email on how to grow as a User Researcher.

Matt Ambler

Matt began his career working for ad agencies designing websites but found his passion for digital-physical design after accepting an opportunity to create a remote-controlled television interface. He’s since honed his design skills working on integrated products for small tech startups and large corporations alike.

He now leads the Interaction Design team at a mid-sized product design firm creating experiences for a myriad of platforms from connected consumer products, to complex medical devices.

Willemijn Brouwer

She has a Bachelors degree in Industrial Design Engineering and Masters degree in Strategic Product Design. And love for creativity, humour and knowledge. Since 2011 she is working as an independent consultant, facilitator and trainer of creativity. She also develops business games (yourninedots.com) and works as a teacher.

‘I was born in the awesome ’80 (1982). I have brothers. I love to brush my teeth and drink coffee afterwards.’

Vivien Melcher

Vivien followed her passion for user-centric innovation by studying Psychology with a focus on Software Ergonomics and Usability. Since then, she has been working in the area of Human Factors Engineering / UX Research for more than 13 years.

In her current role, she is coordinating strategic Research-Ops activities for a team of 13 Experience Researchers and consults organizations with the implementation of user-centric development processes as well as leading research projects.

Vicky De Mesmaecker

Vicky has a PhD in Criminology and worked as an academic researcher for over 5 years. In 2013, she started working as a qualitative research expert in a market research company. Since 2018, she is active at Clockwork, the UX and Service Design agency of Ordina.

Vicky is a creative mind with great curiosity for human psychology. She loves to always dig deeper and to translate insights into meaningful experiences.

Vandhana Bhaskaran

Vandhana is a design leader helping global businesses design and deliver high performing customer and employee experiences. Her specialities include service design, customer experience management, usability analysis and user experience design.

Next to leading a Experience Design practice, she also co-teaches the User Experience Certificate Program at the Bentley University in Boston, and the Design Management course for WIFI- Steiermark, Austria.

Susanne Junglas

Susanne is Experience Design Director at denkwerk with more than 15 years experience in different design disciplines. She started her career in web and broadcast design and expanded her expertise in design thinking and strategic design.

Since 2008 she leads a design team of UX and service designer at denkwerk and is responsible for outstanding user-centred and highly innovative creative work and development.

Stephanie Marsh

Dr Stephanie Marsh is a UX research professional, who has recently moved into ReOps full time as UX Research Operations Manager at the publisher Springer Nature, since November 2019.

Stephanie’s book User Research: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Products and Services was published by Kogan Page in March 2018. The book focuses on giving people who are new to user research the tools they need to do good quality research.

Sandra Griffel

Sandra is experienced in leading interdisciplinary teams of XD designers and researchers in the delivery of sophisticated insight-led solutions that align key business drivers to user needs. Furthermore, Sandra contributes to local and international XD communities, speaks at meet-ups and conferences (UX Cambridge, Interaction 17 NYC, EuroIA 18) and write articles and whitepapers e.g. on conversational interfaces, development of screenless interfaces, future & foresight, innovative user research techniques.

Samantha Yuen

Agoraphobia led Sam from hospitality to human-centred design in 2005. Curiosity, candour, and innate care for the people she once feared have guided her on this path, and she is now exploring how we can enable designers to work well & be well by growing reflective practices centred around skillsets, mindsets, and the use of self.

Her hope: That we can shift the way we work together and support each other to design for good.

Sabine Harnau

After starting the first in-house copy team at LEGO Customer Service and writing agency-side for over 70 brands, From Scratch copy is always based on user research and incorporates UX research results to drive behaviour change and conversion.

Sabine works in English and German, using storytelling to help clients to buy into her approach. She’d love to see a stronger bond between UX research and copywriting — which is why she’s here.

Nic Price

Nic headed up digital product and service teams at the BBC. Since 2007 he has worked as a consultant and contractor, researching, designing with clients large and small in both public and private sectors.

Molly Fargotstein-Sanders

Molly began her career at Mailchimp as the UX Research team’s first and only UX Coordinator. In that role, she focused on continually testing ways to optimize recruitment efforts, streamline procedures, and maximize the evangelization of UX Research’s insights and impact throughout the company. With those objectives forever embroidered on her hypothetical ResOps Super-Woman cape, she now functions as Mailchimp’s Associate Research Operations Manager.

Meena Kothandaraman

With almost 30 years of experience, Meena has consulted to emphasize the strategic value of qualitative research in the design of product, space and service. Meena is fascinated by the complexity of human behavior and applies a credible and structured approach to integrating human stories and anecdotes into mainstream processes.

Meena is a proud Canadian and is absolutely fluent in poutine and beavertails ?.

Mark Schurgin

Mark conducts research globally to create innovative healthcare products. Prior to Google, Mark was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and obtained his Masters and PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Johns Hopkins University.

His previous research program focused on understanding visual memory, and devising methods and computational frameworks capable of quantifying information stored in memory.

Mark McElhaw

Mark is a lateral thinker with a couple of decades of experience in UX strategy, design and research. Often caught somewhere between making sense of the world and finding ways to make it frictionless. Other projects include; a social care cooperative for older people, a research & design framework based on mindstates, and sustainable umbrellas.

Maike Klip

Jos-marien Jansen

Jos-marien is specialized in UX research for healthcare innovations and in Data-enabled Design where mixed methods are used to collect qualitative and quantitative data, which is input as a creative material for innovation.

In her work, she combines intelligent ecosystems, artificial intelligence and deep user insights into user needs. She loves to work in multi-disciplinary teams with designers, statisticians, data scientists, psychologists, clinicians and patients.

Jes Koepfler

Jes Koepfler has more than 15 years of experience conducting and directing UX Research with a PhD in human-computer interaction. She’s been independent, worked for a small digital firm and helped run it, survived a large-scale company acquisition, and now helps lead a growing digital group inside a mid-sized physical product firm.

She’s passionate about human-centred design and ensuring research is a part of the design process.

Jeroen Timmer

His brain is always ON. He is a creative thinker and tinkerer, 24/7 on the lookout for alternative solutions that make this world a better place.

He is trained in IT, worked at Sony and decided to switch careers. With a diploma at Rietveld Arts Academy under his belt, he now works as an independent circular designer.

Jeanette Fuccella

A Principal UX Researcher at LexisNexis with the Strategic UX and Product Design team, where she has responsibility for both UX Research and ResearchOps.

She began her career as a Human Factors Engineer at IBM, eventually moving into market research, strategy, and program management. In between corporate gigs, Jeanette took a foray into the nonprofit world, where she had the privilege to work alongside and learn from true servant leaders.

Jan Chipchase

Providing discreet design, research and strategy services to clients with a global remit.

Author of

The Field Study Handbook & The Little Book of Fixers.

Işinsu Sakalli

As a UX researcher at Shopify she has the pleasure to meet entrepreneurs and learn about how they run their businesses. She collaborates closely with her multi-disciplinary team and provides insights to inform the discovery and development of new solutions.

Before Shopify, Işınsu started as a design coordinator at a 3D virtual reality company, got her Masters of Design at Carleton University, and then created her own motivational design company, Gamifi Inc.

Hung Chu Shih

Hung Chu is a User Experience researcher and cultural explorer. She loves to explore the world and talk to people to learn from their experience.

At IceMobile, she helps bring the user’s voice in the team and help stakeholders find the balance between business challenges and user needs. She believes everyone is a secret researcher, and it is her job to bring out that part of people to be empathetic and think like users.

Holly Cole

She is born in Texas, dropped out of high school and was a neo-hippie for a good while, eventually went to the University of North Texas and got a degree in Sculpture. Worked in oil and gas and marketing for years.

She got involved in the Applied Design Research graduate program at UNT and hasn’t looked back. User research, to Holly, was the only thing that doesn’t get boring, that doesn’t get old.

Hanah Kim

Hanah is the UX Program Management lead for Google Health, responsible for creating infrastructure and programs to enable UX to solve problems in the healthcare space safely and efficiently.

She was previously a design producer for Google’s consumer display ads user experience team and a product manager for the company’s internal performance review tool. Hanah graduated from UC Berkeley.

Els Dragt

Els Dragt feels that being curious is certainly not a crime. She is an independent researcher, lecturer, trainer and author with 20 years of experience. Els travels the globe to stimulate professionals and students to look elsewhere, ask questions and explore more.

She published several research-related books, such as ‘How to Research Trends’ and ‘Dare to Ask’ (BIS Publishers).

Colette Kolenda

Colette leads strategic, mixed methods research for Spotify Free. She triangulates quantitative and qualitative methodologies to enable data-driven product and business decisions.

Before Spotify, Colette conducted behavioral science research in Dan Ariely’s Lab at Duke University. She holds a B.S. in Neuroscience from Duke University

Brian Pagán

Brian is an award-winning human experience designer, working over 16 years on digital products in healthcare, blockchain, IoT, and fintech. He’s worked for companies like Philips, Volvo, TribalDDB, Gucci, KLM, GeoIQ, NN, and Beeline. His specialities include content strategy, behavioral design, and interactive prototyping.

Brian’s Humanistic design practice includes techniques from acting & psychology, plus he’s given talks & classes in 11 countries.

Bill Albert

Albert integrates qualitative and quantitative user research methods to drive great designs and innovative products to clients around the world. He also teaches in the UX graduate program at Bentley University and is Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Usability Studies.

He has co-written two books, including the first book on UX metrics, Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics.

Bert Windey

Bert has a PhD in Psychology and worked as an academic researcher for 5 years. In 2015, he started as a UX Researcher at the European Commission. Since 2018, he is active at Clockwork, the UX and Service Design agency of Ordina.

Bert is an empathic user experience expert, passionate about understanding people and making their lives easier. His curiosity drives him to get a deep understanding of the user and business. He will use whatever method required to get the job done.

Ben Garvey-Cubbon

Previously in government at HM Courts and Tribunals Service, understanding the needs of all users to inform the design of a reformed justice system, and at the Office for National Statistics. Strong methodological background and a master’s in investigative psychology.

Also a Tin-Tin lookalike, apparently.

Aras Bilgen

Aras helps designers, product teams, and executives with using human-centric approaches in product development. He set up and grew many successful design teams that created popular user experiences. He led the experience design and front-end development teams at Garanti BBVA, managed the digital product teams at Lolaflora and monitise, and worked as a UX planner at Intel.

His book on making research a habit in product teams is scheduled for a 2020 release from O’Reilly.

Tomomi Sasaki

Tomomi is a designer and partner at AQ, an independent design consultancy. She brings product strategy, design research and facilitation skills to challenges like organizational culture change and improving the customer experience.

Tomomi is co-founder of Design Research Tokyo and a board member of the ResearchOps Community. Exploring: learning as a social activity, the nature of unfolding conversations, and building organizational capabilities for design and research. Say hi on Twitter @tomomiq.

Dave Hora

Dave Hora is a researcher fascinated by how teams work together—and what it is that makes research work. As a five time “first researcher,” he established the formal research program at a consultancy and four startups in San Francisco, and one in Berlin.

Dave is currently consulting and doing freelance work as Dave’s Research Company, and based in Portugal

Jack Holmes

Jack is an independent UX researcher and designer. His research has won industry awards, notably the 2014 research into password masking.

Jack is the conference chair for UXPA International Conferences. He chaired last summers 2019 event and the 2020 conference in Baltimore, MD, USA.

He’s a keen traveller, from the lava fields of Iceland to the bustle of Tokyo. Jack enjoys nothing more than exploring somewhere new.

Aletta Smits

Aletta pairs her research with being a passionate teacher on UX Design, behavioural influence, and data learning. Her research focuses on the subtle patterns in behavioural data, generated by, e.g. respondents on surveys, and designing interventions to course­ correct when a loss of commitment is detected.

She is also a public speaker and has presentations about the development of the adolescent brain or how adolescents play video games.

Brigette Metzler

She is a jump-in-with-both-boots kind of a person who is passionate about the democratisation of knowledge. Brigette is passionate about the role of ResearchOps in helping researchers do their best work and most weeks can find her talking ResearchOps.

She is also chair of ResearchOps Community, a global community of people discussing ResearchOps — the people, mechanisms, and strategies for scaling research.

You can find Brigette for a chat on Twitter at @BrigetteMetzler