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Judy Ramey

Judy has wanted to know how things really work since her days in the Campfire Girls. Too bad no one is giving out achievement beads to hang on our vests now, because Judy's would be full of them. She managed to parlay a PhD in Medieval Studies into a career that helped bring usability into industry. Lately, through chairing the University of Washington's Department of Technical Communication, she's modeled some of the most successful ways to create, evolve, and maintain a successful academic program focused on issues in human-computer interaction.

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The questions in our field are the same but they evolve as far as how you ask and answer them. Because not only is the computing technology changing incredibly rapidly, but our techniques for being able to collect data, analyze and represent it have changed equally rapidly with sensing, with instrumentation, with the eye tracking stuff. So it feels like that cartoon everybody sees where you're running furiously and there's two guys in front of you running even faster and they're carrying the finishing line. You're chasing the finish line. There's still so much to understand. As soon as you think you're catching up then somebody comes out with an entirely different way to use computing power.

I try to make technologies fit users' needs. These days you get all beat up about that because people don't want to say 'users' anymore. 'User centered design' is considered too narrow; people want to talk about 'human centered design' and moving away from the idea of 'use', which has that sort of 'office' association. The focus now is people living their lives with various kinds of technologies to support them. And I'm interested in the idea that the only things that are called technologies are things that don't work yet. Nobody talks about the 'light switch technology.' Maybe that's a good way to summarize where we are. A 'technology' is something that doesn't work yet.

More About Judy Ramey

Judy Ramey is professor and chair of the Dept. of Technical Communication at the University of Washington and creator and director of the UWTC Laboratory for Usability Testing and Evaluation (LUTE). She and Dennis Wixon co-edited Field Methods Casebook for Software Design, John Wiley & Sons, 1996.