Organizers

Judith Ramey is a professor and chair of the Department of Technical Communication and the Director of the Laboratory for Usability Testing & Evaluation (LUTE) in the College of Engineering at the University of Washington, which she created in 1989. Judy has had a career-long interest in usability and user research methods. She co-edited a book with Dennis Wixon, A Field Methods Casebook for Software Design (Wiley 1996), which grew out of a workshop they offered at CHI ‘95. She has been active in STC, UPA, and CHI for two decades; at CHI ’06, with collaborators, she presented a technical paper, a panel, and a SIG.

Stephanie Rosenbaum Stephanie Rosenbaum is founder and president of Tec-Ed, Inc., a 15-person firm specializing in user research and information design. Tec-Ed clients include eBay, Cisco Systems, Google, Comcast, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. Stephanie has presented at every CHI conference since 1990; she was co-chair of the CHI 2006 Usability Community. A member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and a charter member of the Usability Professionals' Association, as well as a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication, Stephanie is also a past vice-chair of ACM SIGDOC and headed the STC's Research Grants Committee for five years. She recently co-authored a chapter in Cost-Justifying Usability, An Update for the Internet Age, edited by Bias and Mayhew.

Emma J. Rose is a Senior Associate at Anthro-tech, Inc. a consulting firm that specializes in helping government, non-profit and industry clients create meaningful experiences for their users through user-centered design and usability methods. In addition, Emma teaches upper-level and graduate user-centered design classes at the University of Washington in the Department of Technical Communication. She is currently working on her doctorate and is interested in how research methods focusing on understanding people and their contexts of use, such as ethnographic studies, can help inform the design of information and communication technologies. Her current research includes studying mobile phone use and social networks in Kyrgyzstan. In the past, she has presented her work and conducted workshops at conferences for STC, UPA and Participatory Design.

Elisabeth Cuddihy is the Assistant Director of the Laboratory for Usability Testing & Evaluation (LUTE) at the University of Washington. Elisabeth teaches graduate courses in user research methods at the School of Information and the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington. She is doing doctoral research on extracting usability information from low-level user behaviors. Elisabeth came to the University of Washington with a decade of experience as a software designer and software engineer, where she led user interface design for scientific and simulation software packages. She has presented research at prior CHI, UPA, STC, IEEE-PCS conferences, and co-organized a panel on the think-aloud protocol at CHI’06.

Zhiwei Guan is a PhD student in the Department of Technical Communication at the University of Washington. She has an M.S. in precise instrument and engineering from Hefei University of Technology and a doctoral degree in applied computer technology from the Chinese Academy of Science. Her research interests include human-computer interaction, computer-mediated communication, empirical methods for study communicative behaviors, user-interface design and testing, and experimental usability evaluation. Her dissertation focuses on how to evaluate the interface design of digital systems for supporting social communication.