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About the Usability and User Experience Community
Member Profiles 2000

Edited by Craig Marion, Membership Coordinator

Mark Bate

s
Global Crossing Ltd.
Rochester, New York
mark_bates@globalcrossing.com

I began as a technical writer much by chance. My education is in elementary education and psychology. After I graduated from college, I was working in a manufacturing setting, trying to decide what I wanted to do with my career. I knew I didn't prefer to go into the traditional elementary classroom. I promised myself if something didn't open up within the present company (a satellite site of a Fortune 100 company), I would walk away and find something different.

Within six months of that self-edict, a new training program began at our facility. The program started by documenting the production jobs within the plant. It was a perfect fit for me. The company gave us some good basic technical writing skills, and with my education I took off running. Six years later, due to a plant closing, I was forced to discover "the world outside" and that I could actually have a career doing this sort of writing. I then moved into software curriculum development, which I did for two years.

I now work in the telecommunications industry within an IS organization. I am working on developing documentation standards for our organization and discovering how we can best use our well-developed intranet. Usability has become more important as we look at the most efficient and effective ways to get our intranet to work for us. I have enjoyed the tips and facts I have begun to learn from this SIG and look forward to more!

Maree Boyd
Monaco Enterprises, Inc.
Spokane, WA
maree@monaco.com

I’ve considered myself a writer since the age of 12 when I wrote my first story. It was from the perspective of a developing chicken within an egg. I wanted to be a creative writer but believed I could not make a living writing stories. So, I decided to become a technical writer.

Usability has always been a part of my job because I design and develop information and documentation approaches for end-users. I’ve felt my way using a critical approach to information as my guide. In addition, I stay in touch with customer service. I try to create a flow of information from customer service to my department so that any questions that are educational in nature are added in the next release of the documentation.

I have never worked for a company with the resources to formalize usability. So, I create usability testing in informal ways. We sit in the user’s shoes and perform the tasks. If something doesn’t make sense, we change it. If more information is needed, we add it. We simply do what we can to make our documents as easy to use as possible, with the information the user needs.

While being dedicated to my craft and giving it my full attention and drive, I also have four children at home, ages 6 to 16, that I "manage." For fun, I dirt-bike ride (motorcycle), snow ski, roller blade, garden, sew, and read. And then I have no energy left after that :-).

Sharlyn Avina Dimick
Motorola
Urbana, IL
dimick@urbana.css.mot.com

I've been a member of STC since 1991 and graduated from Bowling Green State University with a Master's in technical communication in 1993. As part of my undergraduate coursework I did my senior thesis on usability testing.

As a technical communicator I prided myself on being a user advocate and tried to focus on the usability of the user guide (even though I had no provision for formal usability testing). In the fall of 1998, I left the technical communication field and went into software engineering as a system test software engineer for Motorola at the Urbana Design Center in Urbana, IL. I find myself in a similar role as a software user interface tester. I'm again a user advocate, but I'm now able to influence the usability of the product a little better. This has been a wonderful career change for me.

I'm still involved in technical communication as a freelance web developer. My one-woman business is called Piper's Pages. I'm also a freelance reporter for the Rantoul Press, a weekly newspaper in the town I live.

My husband Steve and I have three English cocker spaniels, Piper, Lad, and Dixie. I also have a stepson Mike who spends the summers with us.

Jane Dishong
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
Dublin, Ohio
dishongj@oclc.org
http://www.oclc.org

My educational background is in international economics and finance. Like many others, I fell into writing by accident (with a shove from a technical writer friend). I've been writing on and off now for the last 9 years.

OCLC has quite a nice usability lab and all products that are touched by end-users must go through some type of usability testing. There's a profile of it at www.oclc.org/oclc/new/n229/ulab.html. To my great delight, I was asked to be on the Human Computer Interaction team. We have great fun working behind the glass on the usability tests. I have found that as important as usability testing may be, it is meaningless until the results are considered seriously and changes are made to reflect those results. Software developers often slip into a parental role with their projects and it is difficult for anyone to admit that their baby may be ugly. Constructive criticism is more welcome when testing is conducted early in the development process and the developer can watch firsthand as a user struggles through a task.

I would very much like to see how others work with usability. There are so many approaches. I hope to find others who will share their thoughts, however casual, on their experiences, challenges, and concerns.

Linda G. Gallagher
TechCom Plus
Westminster, Colorado
lindag@techcomplus.com
http://www.techcomplus.com

I am an independent technical communicator specializing in hardware and software user guides and online help. I made a career change 6+ years ago after working extensively with computer systems and computer users in the "Bell System" for nearly 12 years. As soon as I started my business, I realized that computer user interfaces (UIs) needed lots of improvement. I immediately began giving clients feedback about their UIs. (I actually list the feedback as a deliverable in my proposals now.) Only later did I learn that what I was doing was part of usability.

Through STC, which I've been active in since learning about the organization more than six years ago, I learned about usability as a field. Since then I've read several books (I just loved the Psychology of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, especially his discussion of doors) and attended a variety of conference sessions and workshops about usability and UI design. I'm not sure that I'll make the leap to specialize in usability, but what I've learned has helped me to help my clients improve their UIs.

In my spare time (what's that?), I like to ride my horse in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, ski, hike, cycle, travel, and read. I wish I had more time to pursue these interests and many others. Somehow work just seems to get in the way.

Greg Holmes
Jackson National Life Insurance
Lansing, MI
GregHolmes@aol.com

I write Help and intranet web pages. Our employees have a WIDE range of computer ability, not to mention subject matter knowledge. So usability is a big issue. It is important that we make our information very easy to use, and in some cases use rapidly (looking up information while on the phone with a broker or customer).

Outside of work I enjoy most spending time with my wife, Charlotte (going for drives, walks, etc.).

I look forward to sharing knowledge so nobody has to reinvent the wheel (at least no more often than necessary)!

Stacy Jackson
Anchor Gaming
Bozeman, Montana
stacy.jackson@anchorgaming.com

I am new to the technical writing field. Seven months ago I was an ESL teacher at the University of Houston-Downtown. My teaching career began in the Peace Corps in Southern Africa and I later received an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language at the American University in Cairo. My area of expertise was Computer-Assisted Language Learning, which (along with prompting from my brother) led me to consider a career in the IT field.

I am very fortunate to have landed in a technical writing group that supports and encourages constant product and professional improvement. However, my company does not do any formal usability testing and as a result, I feel very removed from our end-users. As a teacher, my 'end-users' were usually right in front of me. If materials I created or used were not quite appropriate, I knew it because I had immediate feedback. Now I'm not sure that the manuals I write get the message across in the best possible way. I feel usability testing is the answer and that's why I joined this SIG. I hope to get ideas that I can share with my group about how to usability test our products and about what other people's usability tests have found.

On the personal side, I moved to Montana to take this technical writing position, and there are lots of things to do here: hiking, biking, skiing, camping, climbing and the list goes on. Travelling is a way of life for me; my latest trip was to Japan. As I write this I'm finishing up a C and C++ class at MSU, so I'm looking forward to catching up on some reading.

Sarah Lathrop
Forum Financial Group
Portland, ME
sarah-lathrop@forum-financial.com

I got into the software business eleven years ago when I accepted a job in a two-person software company. Over the next six years I was able do many different things, including tech support, training, trade show presentations, QA testing, and technical writing. I acquired many of my skills on the job.

For the last four years I have been working as a full-time technical writer. I took a course from JoAnn Hackos and began to implement her teachings in my work. I recently read her book User and Task Analysis for Interface Design and knew I wanted to be involved in the design of the software and not just the documentation. As I researched the subject further, I found many interesting books, web sites, and articles about performance-centered design, EPSS, embedded help, and other related topics. I began to think of user documentation in a different light; the lines between user interface and help began to blur in my mind. I could see how much more could be done to support users within the software itself.

The company I currently work for is supporting my interest in user interface design. I will be attending a week-long training class and will be involved in the interface work for our new web-based application, which will manage the accounting for mutual funds. Since errors can result in costly fines to our company, it is imperative that we provide the best possible support for our users so that they do not make mistakes in their work.

I see involvement with interface design and usability as a natural career path for technical writers. I'm looking forward to learning new things and taking on new challenges.

Leo Lentz
Utrecht University
The Netherlands
L.Lentz@let.uu.nl
www.let.uu.nl/~Leo.Lentz/

What is the relation between an academic in a Dutch University and Usability Testing? The answer is: teaching in writing courses. There is no better way of teaching students how to write good documentation then confronting them with feedback of readers in real life. Five readers in everyday life have more impact on their writing than ten university teachers. Which does not mean that they will miss my own reactions on their writing. Teaching students how to perform a usability test means giving attention to reading processes and evaluation methodology. This is what I am doing now for some ten years.

What are the most important issues in usability? These are my three favorites. (1) Doing research that makes clear that technical writers and other kinds of experts just predict some 20% of the problems that readers detect in a usability study. Conclusion: you can't do without usability testing. Together with Menno de Jong (Twente University) I have published some articles on this issue. (2) Trying to reduce the costs of testing. We have developed Focus, a software program that enables respondents to give feedback on documents and that helps the evaluator to organize this feedback in an efficient way. Result: it takes one or two hours to collect feedback of dozens of readers, provided you have a lab with sufficient computers. (3) Translation quality! Recently I started to integrate the field of document design and usability testing with translation studies. This stimulates fascinating usability questions we had never formulated before. Just one question is how many non-native speakers of English did you have in your latest usability study? And outside of the university? It's the writing of stimulating literary authors that makes me happy, the music of the oldies we played decades ago, and the walks in the fields and mountains that make me forget the existence of things like documents and usability tests.

Aaron Marcus
Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc.
Emeryville, CA, and New York, NY
Aaron@AMandA.com
http://www.AMandA.com

For 30 years, I've been interested in information design and information visualization. Perhaps this focus is a natural outgrowth of my professional education in corporate-oriented graphic design and before that in physics, mathematics, and philosophy. I started out early as a researcher in computer graphics, becoming, as far as I know, the first professional graphic designer to program computers. When I worked at Bell Telephone Labs developing a desktop publishing system for the Picturephone in 1979-81, I could only dream about where technology would take us. Now we've arrived.

One of the major challenges for us as organizers and presenters of information is to help people make smarter decisions faster about their own lives and the lives of others, and then take effective action. By designing the right metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction,and appearance, we can help people manage knowledge effectively. By knowledge, I mean siginificant patterns of information together with action plans for what to do.

One of the special challenges is enabling people to access large numbers of functions and large amounts of data using devices with small displays, which I refer to as "baby faces." These devices may replace desktop computers soon as our primary means of communicating with others and with sources of information. By concentrating attention on the unique characteristics posed by these devices -- e.g., small size, limited spatial resolution, limited color, ubiquitous use, users of varying backgrounds, varying use contexts, varieties of information, and special needs for charts, maps, and diagrams of structures and processes -- we may be able to come up with new paradigms that will depart radically from our current expectations.

The exciting journey into the tribal world of information rituals, devices, agents, and spaces continues.

Eric Olive
Compuware Corporation
Madison, Wisconsin
eolive_99@yahoo.com

Like many in the profession, I came to technical writing after kicking around in grad school for awhile. My first tech writing job was with a technical documentation firm. This experience proved valuable because, as in many small shops, the writers did everything from standard research, writing, and editing to high end desktop publishing.

This broad experience has proved valuable in my current position as a tech writing contractor. My employer places technical specialists on client sites. Through contracting I'm exposed to a variety of assignments and client settings. I find this variety fun and challenging. One of my biggest challenges has been learning more about usability. Interviews with end-users, some reading, and trial-by-fire have gotten me by.

I want to do more than just get by. I'm hoping to gain serious, substantive, applicable knowledge from this SIG

Time outside work is spent reading, biking, and studying Web development and Spanish.

Eric Peterson
Merrill Corporation
Jackson Heights, New York
erique@ix.netcom.com

Although my degrees are in music, by the time I got a master's degree in French horn performance, I knew I didn't want to be a professional hornist! My career arc has gone through typist, help desk, trainer, and course developer before I became an official technical writer. I have been the sole technical writer for a document imaging product for four years now. As our company has changed management and direction drastically in the last few months, I am now working a lot more on the development end, writing software specifications as well as administrator and end-user documentation. I find this new path exciting.

We have never had a formal usability testing process, but I have always made suggestions for improvement: some obvious, like the wording of a prompt, and some more subtle. With our recent management changes, I have more opportunity to design consistency and usability into our product before the developers get their hands on it, and the company as a whole is paying much more attention to the client's needs. For instance, our product has never had a reputation for ease-of-use, but the latest version offers various levels of complexity. The new user is presented with a very basic search screen and will only be presented with more complex functionality if he/she goes looking for it. This is a major step in the right direction.

Outside of work, I'm still a musician. I am the artistic director and conductor of a community wind ensemble that gives three concerts a year, am active in the local Gilbert and Sullivan society, and enjoy living in New York City and going to Broadway shows with my partner of five years.

Denise D. Pieratti
Xerox Corporation
Rochester, NY
Denise.Pieratti@usa.xerox.com

I began my career as a technical communicator in 1984 after several years of struggling with the computer documentation of the early 1980s. (Did you ever try to interface an Apple dot matrix printer with a Commodore 64? Don't try it with the documentation!) Wanting to leave a career as an engineering geologist, I sought a new career that would satisfy my newly discovered interest in computers, my continued love of communicating and the printed word, and my creative spirit.

A forward-thinking person at Xerox named Peter Balgochian hired me to write software documentation for publishing software applications. Sixteen years later, I am still at Xerox. I have worked in all aspects of product development, user training and documentation, and sales and marketing support. I created a usability group for Xerox Corporation's corporate Information Management organization that focused on developing usable software by matching work tasks with the overall system design, providing effective user interfaces, and by supporting the application with documentation and training.

I'm currently a Strategy Manager, where I help my organization define a vision for its future, the actions necessary to realize that vision, and the challenges we must overcome for the solutions business to succeed.

Outside of work, I'm President of Women's Council of the Greater Rochester Metro Chamber of Commerce and a board member of Women's Foundation of the Genesee Valley. My other interests include figure skating, quilt making, golf, Bob, Felix, and Mandu.

Alexandra Robinette
Worcestershire County Council
Worchester, U.K.
arobinette@worcestershire.gov.uk

After 10 years as a Mac-based information designer working from a management communications consultancy, I decided I wanted to do something new. I took a job with Worcestershire County Council as an Analyst Programmer working in Visual Basic -- trainee, really.

In a way, it is all new to me. I haven't done any coding in 20 years. But the Council promised to train me. The reason they hired me, with virtually no coding ability, was to make use of my understanding of linguistics, human perception and absorption of data and... usability, in order to apply this knowledge to applications development within the organization. So, I get to learn a new skill and I get to use my existing expertise. Big intellectual bonus, fun job.

So far, however, I often feel like a voice crying in the wilderness. A typical response from a colleague when I protested about an inadequately designed application dialog: "Programmers don't need to concern themselves with what it looks like, but only whether it works." I don't know what attitudes are like in the States (outside the STC!), but this is the prevailing feeling in the UK. Sigh... I suppose what it comes down to is how one defines the word works.

Nevertheless, my users love me; and that's what's important to me. I work with a great bunch of folks and I'm making a difference to communication, accessibility and usability within this organization; that feels good. Plus I'm learning new stuff every day. In my spare time, I make music with my friends, singing soul/folk/country/swing/whatever ballads; I also write fantasy and science fiction. I'm having a good time. You can't ask for much more, really.

Regina Schwarz
IXOS Software AG
Munich, Germany
regina.schwarz@ixos.de

After earning a degree in horticulture with an emphasis on foreign languages and international business at Penn State, I became a computer systems manager. In my third job, at the National Agricultural Library in Washington, D.C., I learned how to write. To make my job easier, I wrote procedures manuals for the computer operators. My boss tested them himself. If he didn't understand something in a manual, he called me. Since I was on the fifth floor & he was in the basement computer room, I had to walk down five flights of stairs. (Yes, we had an elevator, but I did this for exercise.) After making corrections to the manual, I walked back up five flights of stairs to my desk. After doing this a few times, I learned the value of complete, accurate documentation!

I was tired of managing systems and wanted a change. Through a friend of a friend, I got a job interview at Hewlett-Packard in Boeblingen Germany for a job as a Learning Products Engineer (technical communications and usability). My fluency in German helped me get the job and I began writing full-time. My nine years experience managing computer systems and dealing with users gave me a realistic view of what users and system administrators want and expect. This made it easy to be a user advocate. At HP, I got more and more involved in usability. I was lucky to have a wonderful mentor, Evelyn Williams. She loved usability and enjoyed sharing her knowledge and experience. I helped develop usability strategy and usability test plans, took part in usability testing, helped coordinate icon design, and helped in the GUI design. After meeting my husband, I moved to Munich and had a daughter. I telecommuted part-time from home for HP the first three years, and I now work full-time as a Product Information Analyst for IXOS Software AG in Munich.

Working full-time and having a family leaves little time for relaxation. I'm one of the founding members of the newly-formed TransAlpine Chapter of STC, and I'm also the job bank contact for the chapter. I like to spend time with my family, go to the biergartens with family and friends, bicycle, work in the garden, read, and stay in contact with friends. The biergarten culture here is unique: you bring a picnic dinner and tablecloth, buy your beer, and chat with friends while the children play at the playground a few yards away. The crime rate is extremely low, the summer weather comfortable, the public transportation excellent, and the snow beautiful. I love living in Munich!

Steven Weintraub
Logical Design Solutions Inc.
New York, New York
sweintraub@lds.com

Logical Design Solutions, Inc. (LDS) provides customized e-business solutions to Fortune 500 companies. For two years, I've been a member of LDS' Performance Engineering Group, where I help manage its usability center, conduct usability studies and heuristic evaluations, and prepare interface design documents and content hierarchy diagrams. I also contribute to internal and external projects as an HTML developer, content developer, and artist's assistant. Occasionally I provide support to LDS' Business Development staff for acquiring new clients and projects.

I fell into technical writing 12 years ago while working as an Administrative Assistant at one of The City University of New York's computer centers: I had been asked to complete a short computer user manual, and I found the work to be both challenging and satisfying. Years later I completed Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's M.S. program in Technical Communication, and then I worked for Andersen Consulting for a few years.

My performance engineering work at LDS is always varied and challenging. During usability studies, I find it especially interesting to observe how people's articulated reactions vary based on their domain knowledge. And, not surprisingly, I find myself increasingly viewing not only computer interfaces but many real world things in terms of their degrees of usability.

Randy Williams
Southwest Airlines
Dallas, TX
Randy.Williams@wnco.com

As far as careers go, I have been all over the map. 8 1/2 years as an Air Traffic Controller in the US Army, and 12 1/2 years as a Crew Scheduler and Crew Scheduling Manager here at Southwest Airlines. I stumbled into Technical Writing by being the guy responsible for writing the manuals and training our flight crews on our crew management systems. When the company created a IT documentation department, I was moved over here.

In the last 2 years I have discovered, as most any technical writer has, that our interfaces were not very intuitive and the design cycle wasn't conducive to creating anything better. In typical Southwest fashion, when I voiced my concerns they said "go find out what we can do about it".

Most of my training has been self taught from what I've learned surfing the internet as well as an excellent course taught by Dr. Susan Weinschenk in Edgar, Wisconsin. I'm currently working on a project that has allowed extensive design considerations and repetitive usability testing in each phase of the project. So far, everything is going great.

When I'm not working you can usually find me running the roads while training for a marathon.