Date: April 18, 2001
Speaker: Panel Discussion —
THE PANELISTS
Jon Meads, Moderator
Jon Meads is a world renowned rugby-playing, beer expert working in the field of human-computer interaction where he has demonstrated a special affinity to the emotional needs of computers. As a human factors expert, his chief contribution to the field has been the provision of an outside view undistorted by the intrusion of reality. For over twenty years, Jon has been an active participant in interactive systems of all kinds as a researcher, developer, and abuser. During this time, he has had a particular interest in what computers could do to people.
In 1966, Jon purchased a B.A. Degree in Mathematics from a trade school for $8000. Since then, he has wandered from corporation to corporation finding new ways to crash sophisticated software as an ad hoc usability tester, leaving a trail of confusion, shattered careers, and arrest warrants. In his career, Jon has impersonated a systems designer, corporate officer, manager, and loan shark.
Jon has been very active professionally but has been fortunate that no one has caught him at it. For a number of years, he has served as Trouncer for the Special Interest Group in the Imbibing Arts (SIGBOOZE) and pretends to be very important.
Jon has been an active participant in standards thereby grossly lowering such to unfathomed depths. He was an active member of the X3H3 subcommittee on obfuscation and meaningless definitions where he succeeded in adding ponderous tomes of verbiage to already ill-considered specifications. Jon is also an international lecturer having once given a drunken oration to a group of diseased and homeless bag ladies in Tijuana. Currently, he is posing as a human factors expert specializing in the development of paperweights for electronic desktops.
—or—
Early in his career, Jon Meads became concerned with the need to design interactive systems which meet users’ perceptual and cognitive needs as well as their practical and functional needs. As a software engineer and manager, he was instrumental in pioneering and developing interactive windowing systems (pre-Macintosh). He then started to focus more directly on user-centered design and methodologies for developing usable systems. He has been a software engineer and manager at Tektronix, Intel, and Four-Phase Systems and provided human factors expertise on user interface design to Bell Northern Research’s Corporate Design Group. Currently he is president of Usability Architects, Inc.
Jon is a past Chair of ACM/SIGGRAPH, a co-founder of the Annual SIGGRAPH conferences, has served on the Advisory Board for the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), was a Co-Chair for the 1990 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and was an ACM National Lecturer lecturing on user interface concepts and techniques.
Kelcie Anderson
Kelcie Anderson is the manager of the Customer Focused Design group at Tektronix. This group focuses on the customer’s experience with Tektronix solutions and consists of Usability Engineering and Industrial Design professionals. Kelcie has worked at Tektronix for the past five years—two years in her current position and three years as a Usability Engineer. Kelcie graduated with a Masters in Technical Communication from the University of Washington and a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia.
Matthew Clark
Matt has been doing usability work at Hewlett Packard for five years. Eschewing the mundane work at HP Labs on new computing platforms, CoolTown, and throwing snowballs at Finnish trains, he chose instead to focus on the exciting realm of inkjet printers. Here, he has become proficient in usability design and testing of hardware, software, firmware, middleware, slideware and vaporware. Despite this, he remains interested in new technology interfaces, connectivity, acoustics, Web design and social computing. In his spare time, he is pursuing the life of a dog, chasing after soccer balls and frisbees. Matt has a Master’s in Experimental Psychology from the University of Kansas and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Washington State University.
Rob Fenstermaker
Rob is an Engineering Manager who has been instrumental in getting a usability group established at Step Technologies. He will participate in the panel as “Defender of Management” and will provide a view other than that of a usability practitioner on the barriers to usability.
Chris Hale
Chris Hale is the general manager of the Intel Center for Usability Engineering, aka CUE. After receiving an M.S. in cognitive psychology in 1979, he worked in the defense industry for 8 tificial intelligence in fighter aircraft and command operations centers. He returned to Georgia Tech to pursue a PhD and then served as a National Research Council research fellow. He worked briefly for the telecommunications systems division at Texas Instruments prior to coming to Intel 5 years ago. His group at Intel is responsible for providing user experience solutions in support of technology and product development and manufacturing processes.