A list of 30 women rocking in UX to celebrate the International Women’s Day
Designers, authors, speakers, influencers, entrepreneurs – here are a few women who are shaping (and shaking) our industry and inspiring other designers to do the same.
Today is International Women’s Day. According to Wikipedia, in different regions the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women for their economic, political and social achievements.
That’s what we’re celebrating with this list: achievements.
Despite all progress we are seeing in issues like gender equality, we believe there is still room for improvements. And there’s no better way for helping young female designers realize their full potential in UX, than looking at other women who are already leading our discipline.
Everything started with Thássya Macedo hitting me up on Messenger: “do you have a list of women to follow at UX?”. I didn’t, and I couldn’t find any good references online. So we figured out we would build our own . After a few weeks collecting references and asking suggestions from our UX friends, we selected a list with 30 women we admire that are rocking at companies, writing about UX, and influencing/contributing to the broader community of UX designers.
Abby Covert
Abby Covert is the creator of the World Information Architecture Day.
Abby, over the pseudonym "Abby the IA", shares content on information architecture with the design and tech communities. President of the Information Architecture Institute, she has created the World Information Architecture Day, a free annual conference held simultaneously in dozens of locations across the globe. She also wrote “How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody” in 2014 at Createspace.
Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel is the co-founder of Purple Moon, the first American software company to cater games to young girls between the ages of 8 and 14.
Brenda Laurel, Ph.D. works as an independent scholar and consultant. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in game field and a “pioneer in developing virtual reality”. She has worked for Atari, co-founded the game development firm Purple Moon, and served as an interaction design consultant for multiple companies including Sony Pictures, Apple, and Citibank. Author of “Computers as Theatre” by Addison-Wesley Professional, “Design Research: Methods and Perspectives” by MIT Press and others.
Carol Barnum
Carol is an award-winning author and speaker, and has published six books, including her latest, Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set … Test!
Carol is co-founder and director of user research for UX Firm, based in Atlanta. In a former life she was director of graduate programs in Information Design and Communication at Southern Polytechnic State University and the director of the Usability Center. In 2013, Carol was named one of the Top 20 Women Professors in Georgia.
Catherine Courage
Catherine has been influencing design and business at the biggest tech companies in the Silicon Valley.
Courage is a well-established writer and speaker in the experience space, current VP Ads & Commerce UX at Google. She co-authored the book "Understanding Your Users" and her work on design thinking has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Fast Company, and TEDx. She has received multiple awards, including being twice recognized by Silicon Valley Business Journal as one of 2011’s “40 under 40” and 2013’s “Women of Influence.”
Christina Wodtke
Christina Wodtke has been helping design business and the business of design at ElegantHack.com.
Wodtke has held a series of executive roles in the tech industry, most notably leading teams who built the events platform and created an algorithm for Linkedin’s newsfeed, leading a redesign of Myspace and its profile pages and leading the design and launch of the Zynga.com. She is also a co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute and writes for Boxes and Arrows. She now teach the next generation of designers at CCA, and write books on business and design. She founded B&A as well, and was publisher for 15 years, author of "Radical Focus and Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web".
Crystal Ehrlich
Crystal is the owner & organizer of the LA User Experience Meetup Group, one of largest meet-up groups for UX in the United States.
Crystal has a wide experience working for companies such as AT&T, Guinness, Levi’s, Microsoft, Honda, Pepsi, Verizon & MTV. She 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.
Dana Chisnell
Dana Chisnell has taught thousands of people how to experience the experience their users are having.
Dana worked for President Obama at the U.S. Digital Service (2014–16) and after that she co-found the Center for Civic Design with Whitney Quesenbery, where her team works to ensure that every interaction people have with government is efficient, effective, and pleasant. Co-author of "Handbook of Usability Testing" through Wiley published in 2008.
Donna Spencer
Donna Spencer is everyone’s favorite Card Sorting lady.
Donna has a career of over 18 years, in which she had written three books: on information architecture, card sorting and writing for the web. She regularly teaches workshops, mentors startups, writes articles for online magazines, and is a technical editor for Smashing Magazine. Recognized internationally as a leading UX practitioner, she is also in demand as a judge for leading web and design awards.
Elizabeth Churchill
Elizabeth Churchill has been humanizing products we use everyday as Director of User Experience at Google.
Elizabeth is an applied social scientist working in the area of human computer interaction, she has worked in academia and in industry in various roles. Her past affiliations include eBay Research Labs. (eRL), Yahoo! Research, PARC, and Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto, FXPAL. She also did a remarkable work on gender equality on our field, co-authoring studies such as “Feminism and HCI: New Perspectives” at Interaction with computers paper, a scientific magazine.
Georgie Bottomley
Co-founder of LadiesthatUX.
Georgie co-founded Ladies That UX in 2013 to bring female UXers together. Ladies that UX now has 50 chapters worldwide. In 2015 she curated Talk UX in Manchester, the first UX conference with an all-female line-up.
Irene Au
Irene Au designed the Internet’s first commercial web browser.
Irene Au is an operating partner at Khosla Ventures, where she works with portfolio companies to make their design great. She has led design at Google (2006–2012), Yahoo! (1998–2006), and Udacity (2012–2014), shaped how the internet works and appears. Irene mentored literally hundreds of designers. She began her career as an interaction designer at Netscape Communications, where she designed the Internet’s first commercial web browser. She do influences the market, recently wrote “Design in Venture Capital: How Design Drives Investment and Company Success” by O’Reillly.
Jane Pyle
Jane Pyle is a must-have in a list like this; she’s sharing UX content on a daily basis on Twitter.
Focused on Enterprise iOS app design, Jane can be named as an active Twitter user and being one of those female UX influencers who post and share news from UX world on a daily basis. She’s also an animal rights activist.
Julie Zhuo
Julie Zhuo has been producing amazing content online on UX and design, while climbing from an engineering internship to VP of Product Design at Facebook.
Julie leads the design team focused on engagement and core experiences at Facebook, including News Feed, content discovery, and Facebook’s mobile apps. She has been at Facebook since 2006 helping the service grow from 8 million users to over 1 billion. She writes regularly about design, technology, and life on Medium. Don't hesitate to follow her on Twitter.
Karen McGrane
Karen McGrane has been rocking on mobile experiences creation and content strategy.
Karen has helped businesses create better digital products through the power of user experience design and content strategy for the past twenty years. She is Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science and formerly VP and National Lead for User Experience at Razorfish.
Kim Goodwin
Kim Goodwin is a bestselling author of Designing for the Digital Age.
Kim has spent over 20 years in UX, both consulting and in-house. She’s currently serving as VP of Product and User Experience at PatientsLikeMe. Former VP of Design & General Manager at Cooper.
Laura Klein
Through her books, Laura Klein helps teams to design products people use and love.
Laura fell in love with technology when she saw her first user research session over 20 years ago. Since then, she’s worked as an engineer, UX designer, and product manager in Silicon Valley for companies of all sizes. She wrote important books such as "Build Better Products" by Rosenfeld Media published on 2016 and "UX for Lean Startups" by O’Reilly Media on 2013.
Leah Buley
Leah Buley is a User Experience Team of One that impacts thousands of professionals and end-users.
Leah is a veteran of the experience design industry, bridging the roles of practitioner and analyst, helping companies evaluate where they stand competitively with respect to design, and then turns around, rolls up her sleeves, and help their design teams do the hard work. She also worked as lead experience designer at Intuit Adaptive Path. She is author of "The User Experience Team Of One: A Research And Design Survival Guide" by Rosenfeld.
Leisa Reichelt
Leisa Reichelt has been transforming public services in various countries with user centered service design.
Leisa has experience on building and leading teams who transform public services with user centered service design. Currently with the Australian government, previously with UK Government at the Government Digital Service (GOV.UK).
Lucy Kimbell
Author of the Service Innovation Handbook, and director of the innovation insights hub at University of the Arts London.
Lucy has been involved in research, teaching and assessment within leading international universities for over a decade, with a particular focus on the role of design in society, services and innovation.
Margaret Gould Stewart
Margaret Gould Stewart has been designing for you and a billion others at Facebook.
At Facebook (and previously at YouTube), Margaret Gould Stewart designs experiences that touch the lives of a large percentage of the world’s population. She approaches her work with a combined appreciation for timeless great design and transient digital technologies, and always with the end goal of improving people’s lives. As she says: “Design is creativity in service of others.”
Pamela Pavliscak
Pamela Pavliscak has been studying how design can makes us happy at @ChangesSciences.
Pamela is a design researcher and data scientist specializing in emotional intelligence, the science of happiness, and positive design. She is founder of Change Sciences, a research think tank focused on humanizing technology. She has taught at the Stanford d.School, ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and Parsons. She recently released “Designing for Happiness: Rethinking How We Create Products” by O’Reilly.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Sara Wachter-Boettcher is a content strategist, feminist, author of Content Everywhere and co-author of Design for Real Life
Sara Wachter-Boettcher is a content strategy consultant, writer, and the editor-in-chief of A List Apart. She is the author of Content Everywhere from Rosenfeld Media, a frequent conference speaker, and a content strategy workshop facilitator.
Stephanie Rieger
Stephanie Rieger is an digital artist passionate about the many ways people interact with technology.
Stephanie is a designer, researcher and closet anthropologist. A mobile industry veteran with a keen eye on emerging technologies, Stephanie speaks at conferences and teaches workshops on design and strategy all over the world. She is also co-founder and principal at Yiibu, where she explores the human impact of embedding technology into every day life.
Susan Gasson
Rocking on academic world doing a serious and profound work about digital design and co-creation at enterprises.
Susan shines at Human-Computer Interaction studies, comparing different design methodologies for uncover the design, use, and impacts of digital technologies for co-creating in enterprises. Her studies employ grounded theory, ethnography, and qualitative/mixed methods to investigate domains including Enterprise System design, distributed virtual organizations, peer- and vicarious learning in online education, and research networks of practice. We highlight two articles: “A Framework for the Co-design of Business and IT Systems. In: HICSS 2008” and “Human-Centered Vs. User-Centered Approaches to Information System Design. (JITTA), 5:2, 2003, 29–46.
Susan Weinschenk
Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D. can tell you everything you need to know about people.
Susan is an Phd with 30+ years for experience on behavior science, applying psychology principles on design, communication and virtual interaction. Consultant for big corporations, education institution, startups and US governement. Her publishments include: “How To Get People To Do Stuff” and “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People”.
Whitney Hess
Whitney Hess in her words: improving the human experience one day at a time.
Whitney Hess spent more than a decade as a user experience designer, and now brings its empathy-based philosophy and practices to coaching creative leaders and their organizations. Her life’s mission is to put humanity back into business. Since 2005, Whitney has instituted human-centered practices at hundreds of leading organizations — transforming process, communication and culture.
Whitney Quesenbery
Co-founder of the Center for Civic Design.
Whitney combines a fascination with people and an obsession to communicate clearly with her goal of bringing user research insights to designing products where people matter. She’s also advocates for civic design. As co-director of the non-profit Center for Civic Design Whitney is a co-author of two influential Brennan Center reports that show just how much design matters in elections.
Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp and Jenny Preece
Authors of the bestseller “Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction”, they have been influencing UX professionals for decades.
Yvonne is internationally renowned for her work in HCI and ubiquitous computing and for her innovative approach to ubiquitous learning. She was awarded for her work rethinking the relationship between ageing, computing, and creativity.
Helen was originally software engineer that has included user centered design at her life after watching for several years the people's frustration on trying to using system that did not support them.
Jenny focuses on the intersection of information, community, and technology. She has researched ways to include empathy on social support online, patterns of online participation, reasons for not participating and strategies for supporting online communication. She is widely published and she is a regular keynote speaker on these topics.
Well, it won't be possible to to cover all the UX women who are rocking on it, this list is only a first reference based on our subjectiveness. So, please, leave your comment in case of someone you think should be part of this list and help us to complement it.
Happy International Women’s Day :)
Thássya Macedo, you rock! No words to describe how great the process of building this list with you has been. I am very proud of us.
Special thanks to Fabricio Teixeira for all his encouragement, and for editing this article to make it look sharp. Also, thanks to Lu Terceiro, lulileslie, Bruno Canato, Flavio Nazario, and anita for their contributions on making this happen.
update: Christina Wodtke suggested UX Talk Design as more reference for genial and inspiration women! Tks ;)
