Date: January 31, 2001
Speaker: Paul Sorenson — Intel
I’ll give an overview of the Consumer PC Ease of Use Roundtable, its members and history, activities and deliverables. We’ll spend some time looking at the process adopted by the forum, which has allowed data-sharing and cross-company collaboration on several white papers, tools, research and design guidelines over the past two years. Finally, I’d like to chat with you about just why ease of use has suddenly (last 2 years) become a buzz word in the computer industry, and moved publications to focus on it, OEMs to contribute people, time and $$, and made the usability/HFE profession one of the “hot job” categories at a lot of tech companies during this time.
About Speaker
Paul Sorenson is formal sponsor for the Center for Usability Engineering, an internal consulting team focused on understanding how end users interact with technology and is setting up Intel’s first corporate-wide user centered methods community of practice. He began his career at Intel in 1994 with the company’s PC Enhancement Operation, which marketed Intel’s first consumer products. Paul has been a core team member on the Consumer PC Ease of Use Roundtable since its inception, where he lead roundtable efforts on the Design for Supportability and Initial Experience Predictor tools now in use by Intel and many PC OEMs. Prior to joining Intel, Paul spent 12 years at IBM Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation and the Hewlett-Packard company working on a wide range of products, including the first PC mice, advanced user interface prototyping systems, and the first palm top PCs. Paul holds a bachelor’s degree in Biology from Willamette University and a master’s degree in Neurophysiology/Liquistic-semantics/Experimental Psychology from the University of Oregon. His doctoral work in human experimental psychology was with University of Texas, Austin.