Jury Alumni

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  Scott Lederer

  UX Designer

  2023 Apps & Platforms Jury Member

  Scott is someone who throws around words like design, product, and strategy, but ultimately just likes working with interesting colleagues on exciting software products for people who need them. In recent years, he has led design at Capitol AI, a startup aiming to modernize and simplify data storytelling, and Azavea, a geospatial software shop committed to civic, social, and environmental good. Some time ago, he designed & stewarded the local search experience on Google Maps for about 4 years. And threaded throughout his career are sundry adventures in design & strategy for startups known & unknown. He lives in Philadelphia and is desperate to tell fewer dad jokes.

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  Margaret Lee

  Leadership Coach, Design Dept.

  2023 Apps & Platforms Jury Captain

  Margaret Lee is a Leadership Coach helping Design and Product executives and practitioners to lead with authenticity and confidence. Prior to coaching with Design Dept., Margaret was a User Experience leader at Google, where she built and led teams in Chrome, Search, and Maps. She led Google Maps UX from its early days as a groundbreaking desktop experience, to an indispensable tool for navigation and local exploration. Margaret also served as Director of UX Community + Culture at Google, a program she founded to serve and empower the company’s global User Experience organization. Decades in the tech industry has shaped her current commitment: to create conditions for teams to flourish and individuals can uncover their unique potential and leadership style. Margaret speaks and writes about her personal journey as a leader, the importance of a healthy culture in the workplace, and our collective responsibility to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

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  Alex Wilcox Cheek

  Design Manager, Google

  2024 Apps & Platforms Jury Member

  Alex Wilcox Cheek is a New York-based designer. For more than ten years, he taught in the School of Design, College of Humanities & Social Sciences, and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon. His courses blended design, architecture, technology, and the humanities, reecting his cross-disciplinary approach to his practice. In that time, he spun o a number of start-ups including Classroom Salon, Macromicro, and Skale. Alex has long been involved with the Interaction Design Association, co- founding the rst chapter in the Middle East, IxDA Doha, and later serving as local leader for New York City. Today, he leads a design team at Google.

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  Ye-Jeong Kim

  Head of Gmail UX, Google

  2023 Apps & Platforms Jury Member

  Ye-Jeong Kim is a Korean-born, US-based principal designer and UX leader who has continuously navigated IC and management paths across her career. Currently, Ye is leading Gmail UX at Google. In her time at Google, Ye led teams and efforts building products in the areas of Search, Assistant, Android, Geo, Payments, Social, and Ads. As a founding member of Google Now, Google Assistant, and Search’s innovation and strategy UX team, Ye has extensive experience building assistive experiences and molding innovative technologies to help people in their everyday lives. Prior to Google, her focus was on information visualization and building tools for people to collaborate and make sense of data through shared visualization of information and understanding. Ye appreciates her name to be pronounced Yay!, pronounced with a ghost of joy!

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  Stephanie Aaron

  Vice President, J.P. Morgan Chase

  2024 Apps & Platforms Jury Captain

  Stephanie Aaron is a design lead at J.P. Morgan Chase where she focuses on making things simpler for employees and customers every day. She has previously worked at quite a few large financial firms and the New York Federal Reserve. She ran her own design firm for more than a decade, with clients including The American Museum of Natural History, Citibank and Barnes & Noble.
  Outside of work she is North America regional coordinator for IxDA.
  A native New Yorker, she holds a BFA from the Cooper Union and an MFA in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts. In her free time she can be found with her nose in a book and a 62-pound pit bull on her lap or in a kayak on the Hudson River.

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  Meghan Romero

  UX Design Lead, JP Morgan Chase

  2024 Apps & Platforms Jury Member

  Meghan is a UX Design Lead at JP Morgan Chase, where she uses service design and collaborative design techniques to improve customer and employee experience. Prior to Chase, she designed new products in the healthcare industry to support nurses and patients and also worked in K-12 and higher education in a number of roles. Meghan lives in northern Delaware with her husband and enjoys Saturday morning yard sales, travel, margaritas, and talking about whatever tv shows she has been watching recently.

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  Jess Greco

  Director, Product Experience Design, Mastercard

  2024 Apps & Platforms Jury Member

  Jess Greco is an experience design and research leader with deep experience in tying customer insights into business priorities that drive design-led organizational change. She has a proven track record in creating an environment that fosters team collaboration and builds design maturity. Her experience is a mix of consumer and enterprise work across industries including financial services, payments, insurance, consulting, healthcare, education and media.

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  Kim Bost

  Product Design Manager, XD Leadership Team, Netflix

  2023 Apps & Platforms Jury Member

  Kim is a seasoned design leader and has worked at companies like The New York Times, Etsy, and Dropbox. She brings a unique blend of passion and strategic thinking to create industry-defining experiences. As part of the XD leadership team at Netflix, she collaborates with a stunning team of designers to entertain the world.

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  Jenifer Bulcock

  Founder/Owner, Peoplemade LLC

  2024 Apps & Platforms Jury Member

  Jeni is an experience design strategist based in New York City. Born and raised in Australia, she established a design business at the age of 24, which thrived in Australia and Canada before she embarked on a new journey in New York City a decade ago.
  
  Driven by a keen interest in strategic decision-making, Jeni transitioned into design and research roles within consultancy and in-house settings. Her experience encompasses both Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX), where she has spearheaded strategic design initiatives and digital transformation programs across various industries. Her portfolio boasts an array of national and global brands, including Samsung, Meta, Square, IKEA, AIG, Better.com, and KraftHeinz, among others.
  
  In January 2023, fueled by her entrepreneurial spirit, she founded Peoplemade LLC, a Service Design and UX Research consultancy.
  
  Outside of work, Jeni finds joy in taking her dog on long walks and hosting dinner parties featuring seasonal produce sourced from farmers' markets.

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  Farai Madzima

  UX Manager, Shopify

  2023 Apps & Platforms Jury Member

  Born in Zimbabwe, Farai was going to be doctor but didn’t get the grades. Now he’s a designer. Make of that what you will.
  Using words, scribbles, and pixels he’s spent the last 14 years helping design and build products and teams in the UK, South Africa, and Canada.
  Today, he makes a living designing interactions and leading a team as a UX Manager at Shopify in Ottawa.
  In South Africa, Farai designed banking apps used by many across the continent. He grappled with unique design challenges because most internet users have never used a laptop or desktop. And some buy data by the megabyte.
  Farai enjoys speaking about bridging knowledge gaps between designers. He’s appeared at events worldwide, including IXDA Interaction and IASummit.
  He organizes Pixel Up!, a series of UX and design conferences and meetups in South Africa. These events connect designers and developers in Africa with their peers around the world.
  Also, he adores verbiage, in all languages, township jazz, nerdy hip-hop, and the number 127.