Jared Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

A software developer and programmer, Jared founded User Interface Engineering in 1988. He has more than 15 years of experience conducting usability evaluations on a variety of products, and is an expert in low-fidelity prototyping techniques. Jared is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute and teaches seminars on product usability. He is a member of SIGCHI, the Usability Professionals Association, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the IEEE. Jared is a recognized authority on user interface design and human factors in computing. He is a regular tutorial speaker at the annual CHI conference and Society for Technical Communications conferences around the country.

Kimberly Blessing, Manager, Web Development Platform Team, PayPal

Kimberly Blessing is the manager of the Web Development Platform Team at PayPal, where she is responsible for driving the creation and adoption of standards. She is Co-lead of the Web Standards Project and works with the Education Task Force.

Kimberly also runs her own consultancy, KimmieCorp. She was previously employed by AOL, where she worked on the standards-compliant redesign of AOL.COM in 2004 and the publishing system that allowed AOL to “go free” in 2005.

A graduate of Bryn Mawr College (B.A., Computer Science) and The George Washington University (M.Sc., Computer Science), Kimberly is also an advocate for increasing the number of women in computing and technology fields. She lives in the U.S., but pinpointing her location can be tough.