About – In Through the Side Door

About Erin Malone

Erin Malone is currently a Professor and the Chair of the Interaction Design BFA program at California College of the Arts. She teaches IXD Foundations, Visual Interaction Design, Systems Thinking, Behavior and Interaction Design History and thinks a lot about the missing stories.

She has been the principal interaction designer at Experience Matters Design, specializing in designing systems, complex internal tools, user research and social interfaces. She recently spent several years consulting with the Anti-Defamation League's Center for Technology and Society, fighting hate in online social spaces and games, and spearheaded the creation of their Social Pattern Library intended to offer micro-interactions and user experience recommendations for mitigating hate in social spaces.

Prior to running her own firm, she spent 11 years at Tangible UX as a founding partner, where she led User Experience Design projects for several Fortune 500 companies as well as a host of startups, including Capital One, AutoDesk University, Netflix, Spotify, Macmillan Education, Akamai, Intuit, Verizon and others.

Before becoming a consultant, she spent over 4 years at Yahoo! building and managing the Platform User Experience Design team where her team was responsible for creating the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and for providing design expertise to the popular YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library). Additionally, she led the redesign of the Yahoo! Developer Network, oversaw the redesign of Yahoo!’s registration system and worked on other cross-company initiatives including community products and the social platform.

Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL with teams working across community and personalized products, a Creative Director at AltaVista where she launched the AltaVista Live portal and their community offerings. She built first generation entertainment guides and community tools at Zip2 for national newspaper partners including the NY Times, San Jose Mercury News and early websites for AOL Greenhouse partners. She began her Silicon Valley life working at Adobe on their first website—way back in web 1.0.

She has taught workshops and been a guest lecturer at Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Centre Center, Tradecraft and General Assembly and at conferences including the IXDA Interaction week—Zurich, Montreal, Vancouver, Savannah— IA Summits—New Orleans, San Diego, New Orleans, Vancouver, Memphis, Miami, Montreal, Baltimore—O'Reilly Media Webinars, WebVisions, IDEA conferences, Web 2.0—SF & NY—WebApp Masters, UIE webinars, BayChi, EuroIA, the German IA Konferenz, and The Design Writing Summit.

She was a founding member of the IA Institute, former chief editor of Boxes and Arrows, author of several articles and is the co-author of both editions of the book Designing Social Interfaces from O'Reilly Media.

In her spare time she is a writer, a photographer—erin malone photography—and a letterpress printer—8 Paw Press.

She has a dog and a couple of cats.

About Aynne Valencia

Aynne Valencia is a digital product design leader. Most recently, Aynne served as Director of Design for the City and County of San Francisco Digital Services including design efforts in the city's response to the pandemic.

Her career spans Microsoft, AKQA, Cisco Flip, Fjord, and R/GA, and She has led teams to breakthrough, cross-platform experience, and campaigns for clients such as Microsoft, Nike, McDonald's, University of Phoenix, Food for the Hungry, Intuit, JCP, Citibank, and Visa. Her background features a blend of experience design, product design, service design, and more experimental work in designing experiences and events for social interaction. She is particularly interested in experimental, natural user interfaces and tactile and experiential emotive experiences beyond screen-based interaction.

She is a full Professor at California College of Art in the Interaction Design program and teaches Visual Communication Design at San Francisco State University. She co-authored the best-selling Designing Interfaces 3rd Edition book, which was published by O'Reilly in 2020.