Ellen Isaacs has been designing user interfaces and studying them in use since 1988. During her career, she has enjoyed moving between product development and advanced development, and between hands-on user interface design and management of design and engineering projects. Currently, she is a Technology Design Leader at AT&T Labs, where she is leading a small team building applications for lightweight communication and collaboration. Prior to that she was Director of Design and Production at Excite, responsible for the design and production engineering of Excite's Web pages. Before that she worked at a startup called Electric Communities that was building an on-line graphical virtual world, where, through the magic of startups, she started as the principal UI designer and eventually became Co-Director of Engineering. She spent over six years at Sun Microsystems, where she designed desktop productivity tools and later joined an advanced development group designing multimedia-based collaboration tools. Ellen received her Ph.D. in psycholinguistics from Stanford University, where she studied how people collaborate in conversation to mutually understand each other; she received her Bachelor's degree in psychology from Brown University. Ellen can be reached at ellen@uidesigns.com .

Alan "command line" Walendowski discovered the Unix shell in 1983 and has had trouble leaving it ever since. After getting his start in the graphics group at Computervision, he moved to California in 1990 to co-found Anyware Fast, a software consulting company. He spent the next decade working on graphics libraries, device drivers, and networked applications for such companies as Sun Microsystems, Electric Communities, and AT&T Labs. Alan considers himself a general-purpose programmer, comfortable working anywhere between device drivers and UIs. He has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Boston University. Alan can be reached at alan@uidesigns.com .