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Nov 14, 2014 9:25:00 AM

The Top UX Influencers to Follow Right Now

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UX is on every dynamic app’s roadmap today, and critical to app survival in a crowded marketplace. To keep up with the latest in the world of user experience, here are the top influencers in the UX space that you should follow today to help you wrap your head around the latest developments in - and the future of - app user experience.

Aaron Strom

Aaron Strom is a passionate and dedicated user experience evangelist who has worked in various roles within design, marketing, eCommerce, technology, and innovation. He is dedicated to User Experience Management and Strategy with proven ability to balance business goals, customer needs and design integrity.

Hi experience includes user experience roles at GoDaddy, Sony, Dell and Amazon and his specialties include product ideation, eCommerce, usability and information architecture.His website and samples of his work can be found here.

Follow him on Twitter @Astrom

Crystal Ehrlich

Crystal Ehrlich is an award-winning designer and expert in the field of user experience (UX), specializing in creating elegant, intuitive environments for mobile apps, websites, enterprise software and beyond.

During her more than 12-years in UX design, she has built up a roster of clients that includes AT&T, Coca Cola, Guinness, Honda, Lee Jeans, Levi’s, Lucky Brand Dungarees, Pacific Sunwear, Microsoft, MTV.com, MySpace, Pepsi, Priceline.com, Verizon, and VH1.com. She has garnered design awards for her work on projects for Heineken and Viacom.

Ehrlich sits on the Board of Advisors for AIGA Los Angeles, Board of Advisors for Cal State Fullerton’s Extended Education User Experience certificate program, Educational Board of Advisors for Cross Campus and also organizes skills enhancement and networking opportunities for fellow professionals through a bi-monthly UX Breakfast Club series and a 3,000-person-strong Los Angeles User Experience Meetup group. Her website can be found here and our interview with her on dynamic UX trends can be found here.

Follow her on Twitter @cbehrlich

Jeff Sauro

Jeff is a Six-Sigma trained statistical analyst and pioneer in quantifying the user experience. He specializes in making statistical concepts understandable and actionable. He is the Founding Principal of MeausuringU, a quantitative research firm based in Denver, Colorado focusing on the statistical analysis of human behavior and quantifying the user experience.  Jeff has published over fifteen peer-reviewed research articles and presents tutorials and papers regularly at the leading Human Computer Interaction conferences: CHI, UPA and HCII and HFES. He has worked for Oracle, PeopleSoft, Intuit and General Electric.

He received his Masters in Learning, Design and Technology from Stanford University with a concentration in statistical concepts. Prior to Stanford, he received his B.S. in Information Management & Technology and BS in Television, Radio and Film from Syracuse University. While at Syracuse he completed a two-year thesis study on web-usability.

Follow him on Twitter @MeasuringU

Justin Mifsud

Justin Mifsud is a user interface designer and user experience consultant by day and blogger by night. As the founder of the blog Usability Geek, he evangelizes about the importance of making the web a usable place and, more importantly, how to do it. Usability Geek was created as a means to bridge theory and academic research with practical and personal recommendations on how one can improve website usability. Since then, UsabilityGeek has evolved to cover a wider array of topics that extend beyond usability, such as User Experience, conversion, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Architecture (IA).

Justin is also one of Smashing Magazine’s experts panel, where his role involves performing a technical review of articles before they are published on the magazine. You can find some of his articles here.

Follow him on Twitter @justinmifsud

Patrick Neeman

Patrick Neeman is an award-winning designer with experience bringing consumer user interfaces to various business to business applications. He is currently the Director of Product Design at Apptio. Prior to Apptio he worked as Director of User Experience at Jobvite. After a complete redesign of the application, Jobvite received a Webby award for employment, and the Deloitte What Works award.

Previous experience includes working as a Social Media and User Experience consultant for Microsoft, building a User Experience team from 1 to 25 at a consultancy, worked on the pre launch team at Orbitz, and the successful launch of several startup sites. He has self published several mobile applications, including the UX Drinking Game and Perks Locator, a travel application. His writing can be found here.

Follow him on Twitter @usabilitycounts

Paul Boag

Paul Boag has been working with the web since 1994. He is now co-founder of the web design agency Headscape, where he works closely with clients to establish their web strategy. Paul is a prolific writer having written the Website Owners ManualBuilding Websites for Return on Investment, Client Centric Web Design, Digital Adaptation and numerous articles for publications such as .net magazine, Smashing Magazine and the Web Designers Depot. Paul also speaks extensively on various aspects of web design both at conferences across the world and on his award winning Web design podcast boagworld.

Follow him on Twitter @boagworld

Will Evans

Will Evans is Manager, Experience Design for TheLadders.com with 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy. He also leads The Semantic Foundry, a boutique social experience design consultancy. His previous experiences includes directing UX for social network analytics and terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com and UX architect for Kayak.com.

Will’s passions include design and critical theory, information architecture, information visualization and philosophy. A distinguished speaker, Will provides lectures and seminars on such topics as social experience design, strategic design, innovation, and findability. Will's work has been featured in numerous publications including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, MSNBC and the Wall Street Journal.

Follow him on Twitter @semanticwill

Rod Begbie

Rod Begbie is a passionate product-focused software engineer, and currently works as Co-Founder & C.T.O. of Sōsh. He now lives in San Francisco, CA, and has worked at places like Slide, Current TV, and Bose. He thinks anyone who gives themselves the title “Entrepreneur” deserves to be mocked.

Begbie’s writing has been featured in O'Reilly's "97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts", and cares more about building amazing teams than building technology. His specialties include designing tools that users love, finding and integrating new technologies, effective system design, internet and system security - and not making the same mistake twice.

Follow him on Twitter @RodBegbie

Matt Cutler

Matt Cutler currently serves as the the Director, Customer Development & Strategy at Cisco. Previously, he was Vice President of Marketing Analytics at Visible Measures, and founded 80108 Media (now Go2 Media), a venture-backed direct-to-consumer mobile media firm, where he was the vice president of marketing.

Matt has a history of leading strategic marketing: at SPSS Inc., the world’s leading provider of predictive analytics software and service, he joined as part of the acquisition of NetGenesis Corp., a company he co-founded in 1994. NetGenesis was the world’s leading provider of Web analytics software and went public in early 2000. While at NetGenesis, Matt helped found and chair the Customer Profile Exchange standard, an XML-based standard for privacy-enabled customer data interchange, and the Webmasters Guild - the world’s first professional association for webmasters. He holds an undergraduate degree from MIT.

Follow him on Twitter @mcutler

Kerry Bodine

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience expert, human-centered design strategist, author, keynote speaker, consultant, and educator. Her belief is that happy customers lead to happy shareholders. She is the co-author of Outside In, a comprehensive look at how smart companies achieve sustainable success in dealing with customers by focusing on understanding and optimizing the customer experience. Read our book review here and visit her website.

Follow her on Twitter @kerrybodine variety_shot-5