[HIG] My introduction

[Adam Elman <aelman users sourceforge net>]

HIG folks --

I've been interested & involved with HCI for about 10 years, going 
back to my undergrad days at Stanford.  I spent a couple of years 
behind the help desk at Stanford's main UNIX workstation cluster, and 
saw enough things that frustrated me that I became really interested 
in how one could design software that actually allowed people to get 
things done without running into quite so many roadblocks.

To make a long story slightly less long: I got a master's degree in 
CS with a concentration in HCI from Stanford in 1995, and ended up 
writing software for Highwire Press at Stanford 
(http://highwire.stanford.edu/) for about 5 years.  The last two 
years I spent as a project manager; I managed the launch of the 
online Oxford English Dictionary in 2000 (http://dictionary.oed.com/) 
and then of a system to do online submission, tracking, and review of 
scientific manuscripts.  I did a bit of usability work on both of 
those (primarily the latter) but spent a lot of time doing 
architecture and software engineering.

After five years I left Highwire to go work for Eazel as a Java 
engineer working on services.  Y'all know what happened there.  :) 
Over the past couple of months, I've been trying to figure out why I 
was so unexcited about the jobs I was looking at, and finally 
realized a couple of weeks ago that what I really want to do is to go 
back to usability and HCI and be a full-time interaction 
designer/application designer/information architect (haven't _quite_ 
figured that out yet :).

Anyway, that's my background.  Feel free not to be quite so verbose 
in your own introduction. :)

Later,
Adam
--