Erin Malone has over 25 years of experience leading experience design teams, deconstructing complex systems and designing web and software applications, and social experiences.
She is currently principle at Experience Matters Design, a UX consulting firm specializing in designing systems, complex internal tools and social interfaces, as well as providing research and creating products that matter to underserved populations. She is also the Chair of the Interaction Design BFA program at California College of the Arts and is an Associate Professor. She teaches IXD Foundations, Visual Interaction Design, Systems Thinking, Interaction Design History and Behavior.
Prior to running her own firm, she spent 10 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, 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, 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—2021 Online, Montreal, Vancouver, Savannah—, IA Summits—2021 Online, San Diego, New Orleans, Vancouver, Memphis, Miami, Montreal, Baltimore—, O’Reilly Media Webinars, WebVisions, IDEA, 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 for O’Reilly Media.
In her spare time she is a photographer—erin malone photography—and a letterpress printer—8 Paw Press.
She has a dog and a couple of cats.