Elizabeth's Usability Background and Work Activities

Contents of this page

How I got involved in usability
Administrative info (education, employment, professional orgs)
Projects
Publications

How I got involved in usability

I discovered this field kind of by accident, after having been a programmer for several years. My favorite part of software development had always been designing and testing the screens, menus, and user entries so that they made sense from the user's perspective.

I didn't know it was a serious professional specialty, however, until the spring of 1982, when I attended a conference with the intriguing title of "Human Factors in Computing Systems." That first conference on HCI exceeded all of its organizers' expectations and drew a standing-room-only crowd of 900 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The conference incited what is today the premier society in HCI, ACM SIGCHI. SIGCHI's annual conferences now draw 2500-3000 people from all over the world, but SIGCHIers still speak of the original conference — almost reverently — simply as "Gaithersburg." Fortunately for me, it was in my local area and seemed relevant to my work, so getting approval was easy.

The light bulb, so to speak, went on.

Administrative information

Education

Bachelor of Science, Mathematics, North Carolina State University, 1974
Master of Science, Mathematics, North Carolina State University, 1975
Master of Arts, Human Development, University of Maryland, 1990
Certificate in professional photography, Washington School of Photography, 1998

Work Experience

Luminanze Consulting, an independent consultancy of my own, begun June 2007
UserWorks, supporting a wide variety of clients, from nonprofit to commercial to government (September 2005 – May 2007; and I continue to work with UserWorks as a subcontractor)
Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), Federal Sector, Civil Group, supporting a variety of clients, mostly civilian agencies of the US Government (March 1977 - September 2005)
University of North Carolina (October 1976 – March 1977)
City of Durham, NC (August 1975 – October 1976)

Professional Affiliations

Projects

Current and most recent work projects

User-centered interaction & interface design of the Patent File Wrapper application for the US Patent and Trademark Office (subcontract to InfoReliance)
Information architecture and redesign of the web site of the American Library Association (subcontract to UserWorks)
Usability evaluation of the training workshop "Fundamentals of Title IV Administration" for the Office of Federal Student Aid, of the US Department of Education (subcontract to UserWorks, prime contractor Low+Associates)
Human factors study of the Web interface to the Employment Eligibility Verification System for the US Department of Homeland Security (subcontract to eNTEGRITÍ, prime contractor CSC)

Important previous projects

Usability assessment and user needs elicitation for the forthcoming e-Knowledge tool of the American Institute of Architects (2007)
Study of readability of health-related articles by low-literate people, for the National Library of Medicine (2006)
Various Web application design projects for LPL Financial Systems and for ControlCase (2005-07)
Various UI standards developing activities
Usability testing of the Student Aid Report for the US Department of Education (2005-06)
Human factors engineering and user interface redesign of the En-Route Information Display System (ERIDS) for the Federal Aviation Administration (2003-05)
Graphic design of icons for the En-Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) project for the Federal Aviation Administration (2003-05)
Usability analysis and redesign of the web site of the Ombudsman for the US Department of Education's Office of Federal Student Aid (2001)
Web usability/accessibility engineering and user interface design for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (2000-01) (note: This site no longer looks anything like what it did when we redesigned it, and IMO it has gone to Hades)
Process/application reengineering and user interface design for the American Industrial Hygiene Association (2000-01)
HCI strategy and engineering for the Business Operations Support System of ICO, a wholesale mobile phone services provider (1999)
System engineering support to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center for the Flight Operations Segment of the Earth Observing System (1993-99)
Web usability engineering for CenterNet, the intranet of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health (1998)
HCI/usability engineering support to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center for spacecraft telemetry simulators
Web usability consulting for Ipsaris (formerly known as Fibreway), a optical fiber network in the UK (2000)
HCI and human factors engineering support to AERITALIA (now part of Alenia Spazio) for the design of the Crew Workstation hardware and software of the Columbus (European) Attached Pressurized Module (APM) of the International Space Station and for the APM Centre (1987-90)

Publications

Editorial board, <interactions>; editorial board, Journal of Usability Studies.
Editor of "The Whiteboard," a column in the ACM magazine <interactions> for designers who are not specialists in HCI or usability, Jan/Feb 2000 – Jan/Feb 2006.
Allen, B. G., & Buie, E. (2002). What's in a word? The semantics of usability. <interactions>, 9, 2, 17-21.
Buie, E. A. (1985). Jungian psychological type and programmer team building. In T. Chow (Ed.), Proceedings of COMPSAC85. Chicago, IL: IEEE Computer Society
Buie, E. A. (1986). Software quality and Jungian psychological type. In J. North (Ed.), Proceedings of COMPSAC86. Chicago, IL: IEEE Computer Society
Buie, E. A. (1988, January). Personality and system development: What's the connection? System Development, pp. 1-4.
Buie, E. A. (1988). Psychological type and job satisfaction in scientific computer professionals. Journal of Psychological Type, 15, pp. 50-53.
Buie, E. A. (1990). Jungian psychological type and subjective satisfaction with using a computer for educational statistics. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Maryland.
Buie, E. (1999). HCI standards: A mixed blessing. <interactions>, 6, 2, pp. 36-42. (For the unbowdlerized version -- with wisecracks about Microsoft left in -- see the original article elsewhere in this webspace.)
Buie, E., Gaia, E., Pensavalle, E., & Vallone, A. (1988). Use of HCI design guidelines in workstation development. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Space Software Engineering: Columbus and Space Infrastructures. Torino, Italy: AERITALIA Space Systems Group.
Buie, E., Pensavalle, E., Vallone, A., & Sarlo, L. (1988). The role of usability testing in the design and development of interactive software. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Space Software Engineering: Columbus and Space Infrastructures. Torino, Italy: AERITALIA Space Systems Group.
Buie, E., & Vallone, A. (1988). Structured approach to human-computer interface design. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Space Software Engineering: Columbus and Space Infrastructures. Torino, Italy: AERITALIA Space Systems Group.
Buie, E., & Vallone, A. (1995). Human-system interaction development: An integral part of the systems engineering process. In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual International Symposium of the National Council on Systems Engineering, St. Louis, Missouri, July 22-26, 1995.
Buie, E., & Vallone, A. (1997). Integrating HCI engineering with software engineering: A call to a larger vision. In Smith, M. J., Salvendy, G., & Koubek, R. J. (Eds.), Design of Computing Systems: Social and Ergonomic Considerations (Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction), Volume 2. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Elsevier Science Publishers, 1997, pp. 525-530. (Available on this web site.)
Hefley, W., Lynch, E., Buie, E., Muller, M., Hoecker, D., Carter, J., & Roth, J. T. (1994). "Integrating Human Factors with Software Engineering Practices". In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 38th Annual Meeting, 1994, pp. 315-319. Republished in G. Perlman, G. K. Green, & M. S. Wogalter (Eds.) Human Factors Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction: Selections from Proceedings of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meetings, 1983-1994. Santa Monica, CA: HFES, 1995, pp. 359-363.
Vallone, A., Buie, E., & Sarlo, L. (1988). Human-computer interface structure and system operations architecture. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Space Software Engineering: Columbus and Space Infrastructures. Torino, Italy: AERITALIA Space Systems Group.
Winkler, I., & Buie, E. (1995). CHI'95 Workshop report: HCI challenges in government contracting. SIGCHI Bulletin, 27, 4, pp. 35-37.

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Last updated 6 October 2007