Why should usability be a priority for startups? What proportion of a project's time and budget can an ultra-light entrepreneur justify spending on UX?
How is the effectiveness of UX measured? How can an entrepreneur quantify the differences in a system before and after some investment in UX?
What can an entrepreneur do himself and under what circumstances should he seek external help designing his site's UX?
How should entrepreneurs go about finding this help? How much should we expect to spend? What should we do if we can't afford any external UX consulting?
How have successful "ultra light" startups addressed UX in the past and what can we learn from them? What are examples of effective UX designs produced on a shoestring budget? What techniques were used to maximize ROI on the time and money invested?
Whitney Hess
Whitney is an independent user experience designer based in New York City. She helps make stuff easy and pleasurable to use. She is a strategic partner with Happy Cog and UX consultant for boxee, among other startups, agencies and major corporations. Whitney writes about improving the human experience on her blog, Pleasure and Pain and can pretty much always be reached on Twitter @whitneyhess.
Alex Kirtland
Alex is Partner and user experience consultant at UsableMarkets LLC. He has worked with multiple startups and small companies such as Moto Research, SchoolNet, InTrade, and DonorsChoose.org. He has also worked with larger companies, such as Ford Motor Company, leading the redesign of Ford.com in 2000 when he worked as a User Experience Lead at Razorfish. In addition he writes the blog UsableMarkets where he tracks the intersection between markets, design, usability and user research.
Karen McGrane
Karen is Senior Partner at Bond Art + Science, a user experience consultancy, where she has worked with startups including Workstreamer, Signal Patterns, and Women on the Web. She is also Chief Design Director for Buzzr, a startup company building an easy-to-use hosted platform based on Drupal. In addition, Karen is a faculty member in the new MFA program in Interaction Design at SVA. Formerly, Karen was VP and National Lead for User Experience at Razorfish, where she led major redesign initiatives for clients such as The New York Times, Condé Nast, and The Disney Internet Group.
David Sansone
David is Director of User Experience at TBWA \ NY, a top-ten brand management agency and part of the Omnicom Group. David's clients include American Express, Hoffman-Laroche, Purina, illy coffee, Dior, L'Oreal, Nissan, Sprint, Visa and Bank of America. Prior to TBWA he was Art Director for the Broadband site for Fox News and Sports. David received his MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts and has a diverse background in both systematic information architecture and creative interaction design.
Allen Ackerman
Allen is Founder and CEO of A-List Placement, a digital media recruiting firm since 2003 and recently launched The Hire Syndicate, a private social network that enables recruiters to collaborate on placements and share commissions. Prior to founding A-List, Allen was an independent technology recruiter and software developer. Allen spoke on the Ultra Light Startups Employment-Related Business Models panel in March 2009 and has been an active member ever since.
