About the Usability SIG
Member Profiles: April 2001

Edited by Craig Marion, Membership Coordinator

• Margaret Alston
• Dean Bass
• Kees van Manson
• Ken McBain
• Mattia Nicoletti
• Ronald Schwarz
• Pamela Smith
• Frank Thissen
• Dawn Whitlock

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.

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!

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.

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.