Welcome one and all (probably one)!
Blogging seems to be all the craze right now and I figured that I'd jump on the bandwagon just before it all becomes passe. Seriously though, I figured that I could use a creative outlet to write about my life experiences with technology and my life in general. In doing so, it's more of my way to get in touch with what's important to me as well as to help develop a community around those things that I find interesting.
I'm thinking that the basic format of my blog is going to not be an aggregate of other blogs but rather to take what I'm seeing and try to pull together my synthesis of what it is that I see. So instead of reposting from dottocomu, engadget, gizmodo, wired, I4U, Walt Mossberg's personal journal, Infosync World, and a myraid of Tablet PC related websites, I'll just try to tell some story that makes sense of what I'm hearing and what I think it might mean to those who eventually come to read my site. All that said, I'll probably also shamelessly plug in the adventures of my family and the cool things that my two daughters, Rachel (5) and Grace (2) as well as my wife, Sherri are up to.
So some background on me so that you can decide if I'm who I say I am and whether or not what I'm writing is actually any interest to you...
First off, I currently work at Microsoft so any and all disclaimers that are standard for a Microsoft employee definitely apply and most certainly will appear on some of the posts here.
I currently work in the Mobile PC Client Business Unit (or some name pretty similar) which is part of the Extended Client Division of Windows. Thus our main charter is for making laptops a better Windows client than they currently are. Ever notice how Windows is identical on your laptop and desktop, should they be? If not what should be different? Well that's what the team I work on is trying to figure out and deliver for Longhorn and beyond. My specific role is as the user research manager for this team; thus my charter is to understand the needs, usefulness and usability.
Now for how I got there since that might be an interesting history of it's own... my resume so to speak..
'90 Graduated from Franklin and Marshall College w/ a degree a BA in Cognitive Psychology. Went to Rice University ostensibly for my PhD in Cog Psych, but got waylaid along by working for NASA and then Compaq. So I became what's known among some as ABD (all but dissertation) in that I do have my MA, but never did my dissertation for the PhD. I personally feel it hasn't been a big loss, but some would disagree.
At NASA (actually for Lockheed who was subcontracting to NASA) I worked on a ton of different projects, from helping to certify and fly the first Mac in space where I created an experiment for the astronauts to perform while on the mission. This was pretty neat in that we were doing a typical Fitt's Law experiment looking to evaluate different mice (pointing devices) in zero gravity. The first thing to realize was back then there weren't a lot of great alternatives available and most of them were mechanical in nature which meant things like the ball of the mouse would float up into the housing causing the ball not to actually roll. That was a great experience, however somewhat disappointing at the time since it turns out that regardless of the actually performance results, the astronaunts got what they preferred best even when it was among the worse performing device. In addition to that project I also worked on the navigation scheme for what was the Space Station Freedom computer console and did some research on expert systems and their ability to impact the decision making process of people.
After I was laid off (or threatened to be laid off) for about the 5th or 6th time since they were always playing games with headcount, I took a job with Compaq. Here I worked in two very distinct areas. The first was on portable computers which included the overall design, Compaq specific software, pointing device selection and optimization and included working on the tail end of the Concerto project - Windows for Pen Computers. The second was in the server division where I spent time working on the mechanics of hot plugging components, disk arrays, remote monitoring software, server management software, Compaq SmartStart (a program that helped install all of the necessary components and software to get it up running quicker) as well as the rack mounted computers that I helped to launch.
After a good three years at Compaq, I decided to join a good friend of mine at Microsoft. Here I spent my first 4 years working on Money and related projects (Investor, Bill Presentment, TaxSaver). At the time I knew very little about personal finance other than the name Quicken which I think just about everyone has heard of or knows someone using it. So I set off to Redmond and worked hard on understanding how people actually manage (or don't manage as the case often is) their personal finances. I helped to reshape the software form being a front end of a database to a tool that really starts to address the user's actual needs in a useful and usable way. I'll probably write more about this at a later time.
After Money, I helped to start the Tablet PC group with all the luminaries that everyone already knows (Dick Brass, Alex Loeb, Chuck Thacker, Butler Lampson and Bert Keely). I'm the person who often doesn't get sited, but I was sitting and working directly with them in the early days when we could all sit around Alex's or my office and debate all kinds of interesting use scenarios or hardware inventions that may or may not really have been all that useful. Over time I'll probably talk about some of the fun and discussion that took place here, but the main thing that was extremely unique for this team was that the first full time hire wasn't a developer, a program manager or a tester, but rather me a usability engineer/user reseacher. I pitched Alex the idea that we really needed to understand the user in ways that are novel to many groups at Microsoft and that there was a whole literature and landscape of pen computers out there that we needed to really understand why they actually didn't take off. Needless to say I spent a lot of the time in the lab and in the field watching users with old technology and the new stuff that we were creating.
Not too long ago about a year ago, a few people spun off the Tablet team to start looking at how we can improve some of the issues that all laptop users face (not just tablet specific) and figure out how we can get some traction on fixing these issues at Microsoft. And that's where I'm currently at.
Lots of things in here, feel free to ask me questions and that might start some of the direction of where I end up heading.
Evan
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
