About the Authors

Julie Stanford’s favorite thing in the world is to help companies use Design Thinking to reinvent a product space. She is a respected thought leader in techniques for need-finding research, rapid experimentation, and cross-platform experience design. Julie is also a recognized educator at Stanford, where she is on the faculty of the d.School and the Computer Science department. Julie has a BS in Symbolic Systems and a MA in Communication, both with a specialization in Human Computer Interaction, from Stanford University.

Ellen Tauber Siminoff gets her kicks by creating user-centered design strategies. No really, she does. As a Principal and Founder of Sliced Bread Design, Ellen manages company operations and spearheads project strategy. She’s worked with some of the biggest companies around, including Adobe, Hewlett Packard and Intuit. She’s led design and research projects for everything from mobile technologies to voice interfaces to desktop and web applications.

Before founding Sliced Bread Design in 2001, Ellen was Product Design Lead at Financial Engines and a member of the research staff at Interval Research Corporation. She’s just about done it all: taught courses in Interaction Design at Stanford University, published design articles, and presented at international conferences. Ellen graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a BS in Symbolic Systems and an MS in Computer Science with a specialization in Human Computer Interaction.

Mia O’Neill loves helping clients design compelling, totally usable products. As Managing Design Director at Sliced Bread Design, Mia works closely with clients to understand their needs, develop design strategies and produce engaging experiences. Over the last twelve years, she’s brought her insightful style to an amazingly wide variety of design domains including: smart grid, insurance, search, shopping, real estate, and even ran a research study with bunnies (seriously, you should ask her about it).

Before joining Sliced Bread Design, Mia was at Stanford University where she graduated with honors and earned a BS in Symbolic Systems with a concentration in Human Computer Interaction. While at Stanford, she performed HCI-related research at the Stanford Cognitive Psychology Laboratory and completed an independent honors thesis on shared representations in collaborative problem solving.

Jenny Mailhot: In addition to having the coolest name since sliced bread, Jenny helps companies identify strategic opportunities and solve challenging design problems. She’s a design thinking expert and applies the process like a boss to all of her projects. She builds empathy through needfinding, develops design strategies based on insights, and creates innovative solutions through an iterative design and testing process. Say that ten times fast.

Previously, she worked at Adobe Systems as Design Manager for the Creative Suite products and prior to that as the design lead for early versions of Adobe InDesign (as it became the industry leader and basically took over the world). She has taught at the d.school at Stanford University and coaches and mentors about experience design. She has a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University, with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction.