About the Usability and User Experience Community
Member Profiles: 2003-2004

Edited by Susan Duncan, Membership Coordinator

• Monika Duvinage-Dalattre
• Ellyn Hassell
• D. Aviva Rothschild
• Daniel Szuc

Monika Duvinage-Dalattre
Tech Writer
Toulouse, France
monika.duvinage@consultant.com.fr

I am a new tech writer, just starting out in the field. I am German, I live in France, and I am very interested in the "American way" of writing. For this reason I signed up Internet classes with an American institute, and ... discovered the concept of usability. I am eager to explore the link between technical communications and usability, and orientate my professional career toward this direction, with a special interest for website usability.

Ellyn Hassell
Blackbaud, Inc.
Charleston, SC (remote in Richmond, Virginia)
ellynhassell@attbi.com

I began studying usability as an undergraduate at East Carolina University. I was majoring in English with a minor in Spanish, and was studying everything from basic English courses to business and "technical" writing.

We had a new graduate program in Technical and Professional Communication and many of my undergraduate teachers also taught graduate school courses for the program. Needless to say, I was exposed to technical writing early on. I graduated from ECU with a BA in English and an MA in English with a concentration in Technical and Professional Communication.

Shortly before graduating, I began working as a technical writer with a software company in Charleston, South Carolina. I worked at their headquarters for a year and a half, and then relocated to Richmond, Virginia, where I telecommute for them. My department's main goals are to create and maintain user guides and online help files for our products. We have done some usability "validation" testing of our documentation over the last several years, but are just now starting to get into true usability testing...this goes for other departments as well, including Design. This company-wide effort is really taking off, and our team is trying to learn more about the role documentation plays in the whole usability process for our development team. I joined the Usability SIG and the UTEST forum to gain resources and talk with others about usability issues and ideas.

D. Aviva Rothschild
Denver, Colorado
Aviva@rationalmagic.com

Currently, I'm a victim of the bad economy, but in years past I've been an editor, writer, indexer, proofreader, website designer, multimedia author, and web usability tester. I got involved with usability while working on my MS in Technical Communication at the University of Colorado at Denver. (I also have a BA in English from the University of Denver and an MFA in Creative and Professional Writing from Emerson College in Boston.) I focused on hypertext and website usability because at that time, it was painfully clear that no one really knew what they were doing when it came to designing websites. I would dearly love to make web usability testing my full-time profession, but it doesn't seem as though anyone has money to spare on it right now. At any rate, having sound usability principles in my head has helped me make usable websites of my own, including HTML-based documentation for my last job. I would love to swap stories with anyone else who has performed web usability tests!

Personally, I've achieved some notoriety with a book about graphic novels that I wrote in 1995 and with my webzine, Rational Magic, which has a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction material by myself and others. I'm a hardcore collector of Broadway musical CDs and could certainly bore you to death on the topic. I also am the author of what is currently the #1 Beatles fanfic in the world, according to Google.

Daniel Szuc
Principal Usability Consultant
Apogee Communications, Ltd.
Hong Kong

My name is Daniel (Dano) Szuc and I am originally from Melbourne, Australia. My first job was as a Windows programmer at Telstra Australia developing GUI applications in MS Access. After working for a few years in development with some very talented programmers (i.e., people who without any prior knowledge of a programming language, could read the manual before lunch and start coding after lunch), I decided that programming was not the game for me. However, during my early project involvement I took a liking to interface design and usability. 

Initially I thought "user friendly" was simply about good screen design. However, I discovered that good screen design was only part of a larger usability world that includes HCI and usability. Wanting to learn more about usability and implement it in projects across Telstra, I applied to a new usability team that was being formed in Telstra's IT group. After several years working with the usability team, I traveled the world, last stop Hong Kong and Apogee Communications.

Apogee is a "user experience and brand consultancy" that assists companies make their products easier to use. In Hong Kong, I helped found the Hong Kong Usability Club. I also hold a BS in Information Technology from Melbourne University. I contribute regularly to webword. And I can sometimes be seen entertaining at children's parties as *Gamellian* -  (yes, folks--that's me!).