Abbe Don, President of Abbe Don Interactive, Inc., is a leading user interface designer with expertise in digital storytelling, virtual community, information architecture, interaction design and the software development process for both consumer and enterprise clients.
She is currently the interface designer and driving force for don.com, the e-commerce offering of Edward Don & Company, the nation's largest distributor of foodservice equipment, supplies and furniture.
In 2000, she worked with boats.com, a leader in the marine industry, to build their product development team and to define their virtual community requirements.
In 1998, she launched The Digital Story Bee, an international workshop focused on teaching people to tell their personal stories combining photographs and text via the web. The workshop has been held in San Francisco, New York, Crested Butte, Tel Aviv, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Moscow.
From 1996-97, she was the founding Executive Producer for electric minds, named one of the Top Ten web sites by Time Magazine in 1996.
She is best known for her award winning interactive family album, We Make Memories which has been exhibited in the United States and Europe. Her ongoing foray into interactive family storytelling, Bubbe's Back Porch, can be viewed and contributed to on the World Wide Web at http://www.bubbe.com.
Ms. Don holds a masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. From 1988 to 1991, she pioneered the use of characters in the user interface as a member of the Guides Team at Apple Computer . Her essay "Narrative and the Interface" was published in The Art of Human Computer Interface Design published in 1990 by Addison Wesley. In 1992, she was the producer of Voices of the 30's, an educational CD ROM about the 1930's.
In 1993, she spent a year doing research in the Agents Group at the MIT Media Lab before leaving to become Senior Interface Designer for Network Services at Kaleida Labs, where she worked on Distributed ScriptX, an application protocol for distributed, multiuser, multimedia, environments for online services and interactive television.
Ms. Don founded her own interface design and digital storytelling company in 1994. Her clients include Ameritech, boats.com, CloudSource, Edward Don & Company, epicentric, Hewlett Packard, McKinsey & Company, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, wineshopper.com, Well Engaged, and Zaplets, Inc.