Luke Wroblewski

I'm a digital product designer who's been working in this space for over 25 years now. I've designed or contributed to software used by more than 700 million people worldwide.

My career started at NCSA at the University of Illinois, which was the birthplace of the first graphical web browser, NCSA Mosaic. My mentor there, Colleen Bushel, actually did the user interface design for Mosaic and got recruited by Mark Andreessen to do work for Netscape Navigator. Being there at that time was a right place, right moment kind of thing.

I went on to work as Lead User Interface Designer at eBay, then became Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo. At eBay, I built the first pattern library I had done, which we called Pattern Engine. After Yahoo, I was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital.

On the startup side, I was Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Bagcheck, which was acquired by Twitter just nine months after launching publicly. Then I founded Polar, which was acquired by Google in 2014, where I became a Product Director leading cross-product efforts on iOS and Android.

I'm currently a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. I've also written three books: Mobile First, Web Form Design, and Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability. I'm a consistently top-rated speaker at conferences and companies around the world, and I co-founded the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).