Whitney Quesenbery is a user researcher, user experience practitioner, and usability expert with a passion for clear communication. She has been in the field since 1989, helping companies from The Open University to the National Cancer Institute develop usable web sites and applications. She enjoys learning about people around the world and using those insights to design products where people matter.

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.

Her most recent publication is a chapter on "Storytelling and Narrative" in a new book on personas, The Personas Lifecycle, by Pruitt and Adlin. She's also proud that one of her articles won an award as a Society for Technical Communication (STC) Outstanding Journal Article, and that her chapter "Dimensions of Usability" in Content and Complexity turns up on so many course reading lists.

An active volunteer, Whitney has served as president of the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA), and manager for the STC Usability SIG. She helped launch World Usability Day on 3 November 2005, bringing together people at over 100 sites around the world to highlight the need to "make it easy."

Before she was seduced by a little beige computer into software, usability, and interface design, Whitney was a theatrical lighting designer on and off Broadway, learning about storytelling from some of the masters. The lessons from the theatre stay with her in creating user experiences. You can find her online at www.WQusability.com

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 for the research and business sectors.

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. Kevin 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.