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Ginny Redish

Ginny Redish has followed her fascinations through decades of change. By asking unrelenting questions about why documents are hard for people to use, she ended up being one of the founders of the field of usability. Her books trace her interests as they've evolved, and my conversation with her focuses on - what else? - conversations.

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Excerpts From the Interview

I've always been fascinated by language and language history, how language changes, and how people use language. That's why I studied linguistics. That seems an unusual path into our field, but when you think about it, it really isn't. Linguistics is about how people use language, and language is such a critical part of user interfaces, web sites, and all the things we work on.

I am in a much happier place in the web world than I was in the software world, where it was just that much harder to get people to understand. You could talk about software as a conversation: the user comes wanting to do a task and says to the software interface: 'Okay, I want to make a bulleted list. How do I go about doing that?' And the software has to talk back again in the interface. But somehow that metaphor of the conversation was never as clear to people in the software world as it seems to be in the web world.

More About Ginny Redish

Janice (Ginny) Redish has been championing the user since the early 1970s, and set up one of the first independent usability labs in the world. She's the author of A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, User and Task Analysis for Interface Design, and the upcoming Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, as well as the founder of consulting firm Redish & Associates.