Member Profiles: 2001



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About the Usability and User Experience Community
Member Profiles: 2001

Edited by Craig Marion and Susan Duncan, Membership Coordinators

Margaret Alston
Populi, Inc.
Dallas, Texas
margaret.alston@populi.com

An instructional systems designer by training, my first love is adult learning and cognition. Like many of my cohorts, I started my career in traditional ISD and Technology Based Training (TBT) development. However, as a result of the exciting trends and developments in the Information Technology and Telecommunication fields, I am happy to say that my involvement with the Internet has only increased. Currently working in the Internet space, I find myself constantly challenged by the changing Internet environment. Of course, human implications of these technological changes are tremendously important to the success of the industry. I am pleased to be involved, on a small scale, in such an vital and interesting subject area.

When I am not designing instructional systems or following industry trends, you may find me swimming, riding horses, playing music (bass guitar), or writing a movie script. Thanks to three large dogs, two cats, and one horse, I also manage to get in my balance of low-tech activities.

Dean Bass
PerkinElmer Instruments
Beakonsfield, U.K.
dean.bass@perkinelmer.com

I have been working at PerkinElmer for five years. After a year writing manuals and help files for our software applications, I became responsible for turning marketing requirements into software specifications, which tended to mean writing the User Interface specifications. When the manager of the technical writing group left a year later, we decided to combine the two roles and I can became the Information Publication Manager while retaining my UI role. I started talking to others about the value of UI design and how common elements of design would benefit our. A year or so later, the company decided to investigate a more common approach to software across our different product lines, and I was given the task of looking at common UI elements.

In the meantime, I started to hear rumblings within the WinHelp developers community that lead me to realize that I was not alone in feeling that technical writers are well placed to be UI developers. After two WinWriters Conferences where UI design was a kind of undercurrent conversation and there were excellent talks by Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering and Alan Cooper of Cooper Interaction Design, I started pushing for more of our writers to get involved in UI design. A few copies of Cooper's book The Lunatics are Running the Asylum were quietly passed to key people and I soon had other writers showing an interest in the user interaction aspects of our software.

Now I head up a group of great people based in the UK, the US and Germany that we have titled Information Developers. The group is called User Assistance to recognize its wider role in all the aspects of the product. There's some resistance, but recent successes include UA doing the screen designs for one major project, another project being convinced to include an embedded help pane in their software and using an Information Developer to review all the dialog text, and other IDs being invited to UI reviews.

My plan for 2001 is to continue the integration of IDs into the software development process, to start taking UI prototypes out to target customers before the software specifications are agreed, and to continue softening up those teams that think UI design has to be done by a software engineer.

Arricka Brouwer
TechnicalDocs.com, Inc.
www.technicaldocs.com
abrouwer@technicaldocs.com

When I entered college, I'd never heard of technical writing or usability. However, at the end of my sophomore year, I knew that I wanted to be a technical writer. It was one of the few careers that would allow me to use my writing skills, make money, and provide a means to remain current on the hottest computer-related technologies. After completing two internships and the coursework for my new academic focus, I graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in rhetoric and professional communication.

I got a job at a software company working with two other technical writers. Due to attrition and layoffs within my company, I soon became the lone technical writer. This proved to be quite challenging because the company was still producing the same number of products. I became concerned that my writing was suffering due to my hectic schedule, so I became interested in usability as a means of ensuring my manuals were actually useful to our customers.

When I conducted my first usability test, I had little formal training in the area of usability. I had read STC articles and I had take a few graduate level classes that introduced me to different testing methods and the writings of usability experts. In the middle of a particularly demanding project, I made the time to conduct a usability test. The feedback we received was invaluable. We made changes to the product that responded to the feedback of our evaluators and the product we shipped was significantly better than it would have been had we not conducted the usability tests. The company asked me to conduct usability tests for all future product releases and our customers and the press noticed and appreciated the changes we made to each subsequent release.

I'm looking forward to learning more about usability from STC and this SIG so I can continue to apply what I learn to my documentation. I've learned that no matter how well I think I write, good sentence structure doesn't necessarily make printed or online help usable.

Julia Brown
Coherent
Palo Alto, California
Julia_Brown@cohr.com

I stumbled upon the technical writing profession four years ago, soon after I moved to Palo Alto, CA. Being new to the area and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I took a temp job as an admin in a Marcom department. Within a few months, the job morphed into a technical writing position, and I've been there ever since. I had never even heard of technical writing before moving out here, but my new manager assured me that it is a great career path, particularly in Silicon Valley.

Unlike most companies in the area, we are not a software company; we manufacture medical lasers. My department is responsible for producing operator manuals for the end user. Therefore, my interest in usability is less about user interface than it is about the ease of using our manuals. We have no formal process for usability testing, so I've been taking classes and gathering information on usability, in an effort to build usability testing into the writing process.

When I'm not working or stuck in traffic, I enjoy spending time with my husband and two-year-old son. A typical toddler, Jake adds excitement and chaos to my otherwise orderly and mundane life. With any remaining spare time, I like to eat and sleep.

Becky Franklin
Jackson National Life Insurance
St. Louis, Missouri
bfrankli@apcc.com

Technical writing was originally a way for me to make money after graduating from a small liberal arts university with a degree in English and a minor in Biology. Unfortunately, the working world was not as kind to me as I would have hoped. After applying for several entry-level positions and coming up empty-handed, I applied to Miami University's technical writing graduate program and graduated last year with a Master's degree in Technical and Scientific Communication (MTSC).

When I first began the program, I hated it. We discussed usability problem-solving techniques in every class and my classmates and I started growing weary of the topic. I thought I had applied to a writing program, not a human factors program. I wondered what all of the fuss was about and I seriously doubted that any of what I was learning would apply to my eventual entry into that working world I longed to be a part of. By the time I finished the program, I was through with usability, but what I didn't realize is that I had internalized the lessons I had learned, and I was already operating under the principles that I thought I loathed.

Now that I am on the job, I wish that more people discussed usability problem-solving techniques. We have no formal usability process in place. I try to implement usability into my documentation projects, but I know that I fall short in providing what my users need. (If I could only ask them!). I have joined the Usability SIG for inspiration and new ideas. We are currently working on reorganizing our processes to include usability testing and we are planning to hire a usability engineer to help us. In the mean-time I read as much as I can, and I have attended a few seminars to keep me informed of ways to implement usability into our process and of ways to convince management of its value.

Helen Hopkinson
Industri-Matematik International
Stockholm, Sweden
heho@im.se

Like many other technical communicators, I haven't had a "natural" entrance into the technical communication world. I graduated from the University of Hull, England in 1995 with a degree in Scandainavian Studies (!) and two weeks after graduation started at a Swedish software company in Stockholm - which is where I still am today.

I have only recently "fallen into" technical communication after working as a translator, translation administrator and terminologist for the first 4 years. I have been interested in usability for the past couple of years, but have been fighting a losing battle in a product development department involved in projects that don't make time for anything other than coding. After attending the WinWriters Europe conference in London in May this year, I was inspired by many of the usability seminars and decided to really try to make a difference. Wish me luck! I'm looking forward to learning about the finer points of usability from the SIG.

In my spare time, I enjoy walking in the Swedish countryside, especially in the spectacular Stockholm archipelago, reading criminal thrillers and traveling.

Victoria A. Kirkpatrick
Star Systems, Inc.
Maitland, Florida
Vkirkpatrick@star-system.com

After seven years as an Executive Assistant to the CIO for the largest regional electronic funds transfer network in the United States, technical writing seemed to be the next logical step in my career. I had reached the top of the ladder as an executive secretary, and wanted to continue to learn news skills and utilize the skills I already had. I approached management and, fortunately, they created a technical writing position for me.

As an executive assistant , I was responsible for various technical and user manuals and the company's operating regulations. I was fluent in the industry terminology, having been a participant on our Operations/Technology Committee for seven years. What I lacked in technical knowledge, I made up for in writing skills and my ability to learn new things quickly. In my new position, I continue to learn more about the technical aspects of my company's business every day. Star Systems has grown tremendously and the technical writing department has grown along with it. As a technical writer, I have responsibility for the company's statistical data. I am currently in the process of taking our many manuals and statistical reports and converting them to PDF for use on our company intranet.

When I'm not learning more about my job, I enjoy making porcelain dolls with elegant gowns for my granddaughters, working on various other crafts projects, reading, swimming, and walking on the beach.

Kees van Manson
Almere, the Netherlands
c.van.mansom@tiscali.nl

I started my career as a technical writer in 1991, while finishing my study Linguistic competence at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Although there was not much of a market for technical writers at that time, I decided to become a technical writer because it combined my passion for writing with my curiosity for (new) technology. In 1995 I became documentation manager at Priva Hortimation, a company that produces climate computers and other automation products for greenhouses. I worked closely together with the developers of new applications and this gave me the opportunity to discuss the Interface and make changes to it. During the two years that I worked there I got more and more involved in the process of designing applications, while still providing the documentation and online help for the products.

By the end of 1996 I decided that I wanted to focus more on software development and accepted a job at IQUIP Informatica, a Dutch ICT company. As an implementation consultant I am responsible for implementing new ICT solutions in organizations; which means creating a design of the application and informing, instructing and motivating end users of a new application by means of internal communication, user manuals, on-line help, Inter- and Intranet and CBT's. Although I still write, my primary focus is now on user-centered design of ICT applications. Joining this SIG is therefore a logical step. I am looking forward to exchange knowledge with all of you.

In my spare time I work in and around the house, spend time with my wife and little daughter and play a computer game every once in a while.

Ken McBain
Agilent Technologies
Edinburgh, Scotland
kenneth_mcbain@agilent.com

I'm a relative new-comer to technical writing. I graduated in Computing from Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and then spent almost four years doing technical support of a large distributed network monitoring system, developed by Hewlett-Packard. In my support role I was a user of documentation and training - my success at solving customers' problems was often directly linked to the quality of the documentation I was given. In these circumstances you quickly decide what you want from documentation and how you want it presented.

Having now moved to a technical writing position, where I'm responsible for developing training and documentation for a new system, I hope I keep my awareness of the users' needs. My primary goal is to influence the product itself so that it doesn't need documentation. However, where it's still necessary I hope that what I write will enable people to do their jobs.

Most of my free time is taken up coordinating the children's work in my church. Teaching 5 year-old children has also taught me a lot about communication!

Frank M. Marchak
Veridical Research and Design
Bozeman, MT
fmarchak@veridicalresearch.com

I am a human factors engineering psychologist with a background in cognition and perception, experimental design and analysis, and usability engineering. I've spent fourteen years in the areas of human-computer interaction design, information visualization, and applied research for a variety of government and commercial clients.

My recent efforts have focused on information design, both for electronic documents and in the area of diagrammatic reasoning. Work with interactive electronic technical manuals has involved providing expertise on cognitive issues involved with on-line text comprehension and navigation to help make document interaction more intuitive and effective for the user. I also conduct basic and applied research examining how people interpret and interact with graphs and diagrams, particularly with regard to the effect of the specific interpretation task on the type of graph used. This work is applied toward presenting large diagrams in electronic documentation; since it's much easier to interact with a large, foldout paper diagram then to deal with one on a computer screen. There's little research investigating how best to present such information in a manner that allows users to navigate through it effectively to solve problems.

While I come with a background in usability, I look forward to learning more about the area of technical communication and how to better apply to my work the specialized skills possessed by fellow STC members. I also produce numerous manuals and technical reports, both paper and electronic, which could benefit from the knowledge and expertise of those in this group.

Mattia Nicoletti
Welcome 2000 Srl
Milan, Italy
m.nicoletti@tin.it

Art and business, design and marketing, tradition and technology, have always been part of my life since my University thesis about the structure of cinema enterprises.

My first job was with Donna Karan, a fashion company, where I was a sales rep in the European market. Then I worked in the marketing department of Romeo Gigli, another fashion company, and then in the marketing communications department of the department store chain La Rinascente, where I worked with new projects, among them the web site development plan for that company.

As leader of the web team of this traditional company I had found project management to be a creative challenge that required with both ideas and solid experience. Now that I am the marketing manager of an Italian web agency (the partner of a large advertising agency), I see the importance of a web project having a product manager who is responsible for both marketing and art and graphics to achieve the site's best look and to have usability that supports the client's objectives and target.

I found when I joined this team that its strengths were mainly in graphics. I had to introduce a marketing and commercial approach in all the steps of a web project. The competencies I had acquired together with a very knowledgeable art director have allowed us to overcome a number of usability problems as we have developed the site.

When I have time I like watching movies (I manage a movie review newsletter and collect movie posters), playing tennis, and eating at Japanese and other ethnic restaurants. Traveling, too, is very important for me. I am fascinated by the countries of the Middle East and the desert.

Ronald Schwarz
3Com Israel Ltd.
Hertzliah, Israel
Ronald_Schwarz@eur.3com.com

Technical writing is my third career. In college I was interested in the sciences and history. It did not occur to me then that technical writing could be enjoyable. I studied mathematics and obtained an MS degree in Operations Research. I started out in Operations Research in various uninteresting government jobs in the States. I left government to work as a systems engineer in a number of high technology companies where I was part of a team writing proposals for government contracts and product specifications for data communications software.

When I came to Israel, my employers needed me much more for writing technical and marketing documents than for engineering. I found that I enjoyed written communications work with all the modern tools now available for DTP. I have had some involvement with software documentation, including specifications, but much more with data communications, especially manuals for hardware.

I found a wide variation of user friendliness in product interfaces. Software companies in this day and age seem to make maximum use of GUI interfaces and try to make their products easier to learn and more intuitive to use. On the other hand, there is pressure among communications equipment manufacturers to get a product into the market as early as possible and impose text based tabular interfaces on such customers as network integrators and administrators.

I am now trying to get the interfaces to be more user friendly. There is also a problem of integrating products from two different divisions and trying to get the product to present a single integrated interface to the user. I hope to be more actively involved in the planning of newer products as well as documenting the interfaces the engineers have designed.

After work hours I enjoy reading an English book with my son and sharing other activities with my family. Life has been very hectic since coming to Israel, but I am finding time again to go to a health club. I also enjoy going on day trips with the family.

Pamela Smith
THINQ
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
www.THINQ.com
pamela.smith@thinq.com

I began my technical writing career in May 1999 when I landed a job with a dot-com company. I had been doing some freelance writing for a local magazine, but it just wasn't working for me financially, so I made a career change.

One of the first projects assigned to me was an in-house presentation about the test results of a third-party usability study conducted on our site. I was hooked. I started reading everything I could about usability, web-based or otherwise. I was delighted to discover the STC had a Usability group.

Understanding how people interact with technology and information fascinates me. Working on that usability project made me think more carefully about my other projects, and about how I might improve them to help people find the information they need quickly and easily. This led me to reassess my document formats, the tools I used and the delivery method.

While the technical writing group here doesn't produce the text that appears on the site (that corner belongs to Marketing), we still have customers (sales, customer service reps, product managers, developers) who need to access information to do their job and keep the company in business.

Thanks for making my job easier.

Frank Thissen
University of Applied Sciences
Stuttgart, Germany
http://www.frank-thissen.de
fthissen@acm.org

After my studies in literature, linguistics and philosophy I started my career in 1992 at Siemens Industrial Automation as a technical writer. At the same time I worked on tutorial systems and computer-based training. My activities in that field became more and more intense and I learned a lot about usability and human computer interaction. In 1994 I joined SAP, and in 1997 became a professor of multimedia communication and information design. At the moment I´m building the first course of studies in information design in Germany.

Since 1998 I have organized virtual seminars at our university. What I noticed is that the user interface of the tools for web-based classes is very important because of the emotional and social aspects of human learning and communication. Humans are full of emotions and feelings and their limbic system (the part of the brain that creates the emotions) influences thinking very intensively. So learning with the computer is not an "out of body experience", but a difficult way of learning. Online learning systems have to focus much more on emotional aspects, which means that the systems should motivate the users. They should also help their users communicate with other learners and provide the opportunity for informal interactions outside the learning topics. Online learning should give learners lots of possibilities to be as active as possible as well. Constructivism (based on new discoveries of brain sciences) has showed us that learning is not a process of filling a cabinet but an active construction process.

I published a "Screen-Design-Handbook" which will be translated into English at the end of this year. Now I´m writing a book about "web usability testing" and another about "system theory."

We have two daughters. During my free time I like to take black and white photographs or play the saxophone, which I´m learning to play at the moment. I like Jazz music very much as well as American authors of the beat generation and science fiction movies.

Basil White
Washington, DC
basilwhite@basilwhite.com

One day at boarding school, my English teacher, a tall, elderly Texas priest with a full head of shocking white hair, had each student write a set of instructions for folding a piece of paper so that it will fit into a 3 1/2" x 6 1/2" envelope. We then exchanged instructions and followed each other's instructions explicitly. No one folded the paper correctly. That lesson taught me how challenging technical communication can be, and the value of learning how to communicate in a style that minimizes opportunities for misinterpretation.

At the 1997 STC conference in Anaheim, then-Usability SIG president Ginny Redish asked the attendees at the Conference SIG meeting what the SIG could do to serve the STC in new ways. I suggested that we should adapt the STC manual evaluation workshops into a method for evaluating the usability of the products for which STC members create technical communication. Since then, the Usability Evaluation Workshop has become a useful way to learn the dialogue of usability, share expertise with others, and provide useful tips to developers on how to improve their products.

At the STC conference, I am known as the "usability bouncer," because I stand outside the conference room where the Usability Evaluation Workshop is held and prevent the uninvited from threatening the intellectual property of the unreleased products being evaluated in the room. Become an evaluator, or submit your product! It's fun.

Dawn B. Whitlock
Tait Electronics Ltd.
Christchurch, New Zealand
dawn.whitlock@tait.co.nz

After graduating in European History, I worked in customer service, administration, and sales and marketing before setting up my own computer training business upon arriving in New Zealand from the UK in 1997. Running my own training business was a fantastic experience, and I relished the challenges. I wrote all my own training materials, and after a while found that I enjoyed the writing more than the training (to the extent that I published a computer book!). I now work as a technical writer for an electronics firm in Christchurch, New Zealand.

For me usability means "Reducing the levels of frustration and increasing the levels of enjoyment for readers by understanding and then meeting (and surpassing) their documentation needs"!! I joined the SIG to learn more about the field so I can write and create documents (primarily online) that meet the needs of the user, answer the questions they have, and help them get the most out of the product they are using. This, in turn, will hopefully mean they enjoy using our products because they know how.

Outside of work, I read contemporary literature avidly, see as many films (art-house mainly) as I can, and explore the beauty of NZ through hiking, cycling, boating, and fishing.

Rob Wolfe
Towers Perrin
Philadelphia, PA
wolfer@towers.com

Like many professionals in our field, it was never my goal to become a technical writer. I graduated from college with a B.S. in Business Administration and a major in Quantitative Business Analysis. Then I worked as a research analyst and an SAS Programmer before becoming a technical writer.

Last year, I moved to Philadelphia and joined a team where I'm helping to show that technical writing in the e-age demands more "technical" than "writing." I have spent most of my time researching and developing new approaches to user assistance, devising workflows, designing HTML-based Help, and conducting training within our department on our new tools and strategies. Earlier this year, our team of technical writers was renamed from "Documentation" to "Visual Design and Communication." While we still focus on providing user documentation and online help for our systems, our new identity reflects our evolving role as both participants and leaders in other areas of system development and delivery, including software interface design, graphic design, and requirements specification, and in the areas of internal marketing and communication on our corporate intranet and within our area of business.

Recently, we ceased distribution of print manuals in favor of PDF distribution of all new user manuals. In conjunction with this move, we've left WinHelp behind in favor of a completely tips-oriented HTML-based Help system. Our new highly customized Help interface uses javascript and CSS to enhance navigation and usability for multiple levels of users. We have committed ourselves to redefining the traditional "user manual" and providing truly useful user support tools.

More than ever, our team is evaluating and demonstrating the need to more systematically address usability in both our online help and support systems and our department's software applications as we transition away from the mainframe interface to a new generation of browser-based systems . While we were known as "documentors" not long ago, our team is becoming recognized and called upon as authorities on user interface design and usability, thanks to the interests, initiatives, and expertise of the-group-formerly-known-as-Documentation. I joined the Usability SIG to broaden my awareness and knowledge of usability issues and my exposure to usability experts.