Whitney Quesenbery is a user researcher, user experience practitioner, and usability expert with a passion for clear communication. She has been in the field for too many years, working with organizations from The Open University to the National Cancer Institute. She enjoys learning about people around the world and using those insights to design products where people matter.

Before she was seduced by a little beige computer into software, usability, and interface design, her first career was in theatre as a lighting designer. Like every other element of the production, lighting has to help tell the story. The scenery, lighting, costumes, direction and acting all have to work together - tell the same story. She learned a lot about the craft of storytelling from watching hours of rehearsals.

Whitney has served as president of the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA), on the boards of the Center for Plain Language and UXnet, and as a manager of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) Usability and User Experience Community

As a member of two US government advisory committees, she is working to update the US accessibility requirements in "Section 508" and to improve the usability and accessibility of voting systems for US elections.

Whitney is a frequent author and presenter in industry events and is a contributor to UXMatters.com. Her first publication on storytelling was a book chapter on "Storytelling and Narrative" in The Personas Lifecycle, by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin. She's also proud that her chapter "Dimensions of Usability" in Content and Complexity turns up on so many course reading lists.

You can find her online at www.WQusability.com and on Twitter @whitneyq

Kevin Brooks is a Principal Staff Researcher for Motorola Labs and a professional oral storyteller. At Motorola Kevin researches new user interface technologies and expresses them using various media, as connected user-centered experiences.

His academic career went back and forth between engineering/computer science and filmmaking. Kevin liked both, but hungered for them to be more integrated long before it was fashionable. While researching how the computer and the filmmaker could tell stories together, he found the oral storytelling community in the Boston area. There is so much natural integration between skills, modalities, tools and techniques in storytelling that it often goes unnoticed. He says that as he developed and performed as a storyteller, then began coaching storytellers, he's learned a lot about how storytelling is a pivotal part of the creation, performance and design process.

As a writer and performing oral storyteller, Kevin tells personal tales from his urban childhood of the 60's, his 70's adolescence, 80's adulthood, through to his present day parenthood of adolescents. His stories for adults and family audiences resonate with humor and poignancy, as can be heard on his CD Kiss of Summer, and he has been featured performer at storytelling festivals, conferences and other venues. Kevin has given numerous storytelling workshops to engineers, designers, storytellers and even people with normal world views.

Kevin received his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, where his area of research was computational narrative and interactive cinema. He has also studied engineering, computer science, creative writing and film production as an undergraduate, receiving a BS in Communications from Drexel University and an MA in Documentary Film from Stanford University. Kevin has several published papers on storytelling and interactive story design.