Keynote Presentation:

Yours, Mine, and Ours - Connecting Ourselves and the Communities We Belong To

Dr. Janice (Ginny) Redish

We all belong to many communities—by birth and by choice; for personal reasons and for professional reasons; geographic communities and virtual communities and communities like UPA where many of us meet face to face only for this short time each year.

Come have fun with Ginny Redish as she helps us think about communities and the ways in which they connect. This talk will be interactive and engaging—and also quite serious—as Ginny explores with us what makes a group into a community and the implications of a community focus for our work.

As a linguist, Ginny brings us insights about how people use language to identify themselves as community members. She will show us how "multilingual" we all are—how we change the way we communicate in different communities and different situations—even within one "language," be that English or Swedish or Spanish or… .  She will also make us realize how much more aware of our communication styles and languages we may need to be as we connect to more communities in more ways with more technologies.

In this talk, Ginny will look in depth at the role of communication within a community and between communities. With examples and stories, she will help us think about communicating with other communities using their language, helping team members learn and use the language of the communities we are developing for, and getting others to appreciate the language and techniques of the usability community.

About Ginny Redish

Ginny Redish is President of Redish & Associates, Inc., in Bethesda, Maryland. For more than 20 years, Ginny has helped companies and government agencies solve problems in usability and clear communications. She helps clients understand and adopt user-centered design processes and practices. She helps with all the techniques in the usability toolkit, from strategic consulting through user and task analysis, design, and iterative usability testing, helping teams use the results to develop useful web sites and other products.

Ginny is a linguist by training (with a Ph.D. from Harvard). She has read extensively in sociolinguistics (how communities use language) as well as psycholinguistics (how individuals learn and use language) and has taught courses in cross-cultural interviewing as part of her work on user and task analysis. In addition, Ginny serves on the editorial board of several journals and has published numerous papers and book chapters on various aspects of communities, linguistics, user-centered design, task analysis, usability testing, clear writing, and information design.

Ginny is sought after as a speaker and workshop leader; she is a dynamic instructor. In September 2003, she keynoted the Yggdrasil conference in Norway for the Norwegian Computer Society. Nokia has twice brought Ginny to Finland to give courses on design and usability for web developers and technical communicators. In the fall of 2002, she was in Slovenia, teaching workshops on usability and writing for the web to technical communicators and usability specialists from five European countries. In the spring of 2003, she keynoted the London conference on Hot Topics in Usability.

Ginny has been an active member of the UPA community since 1992 when she was an invited speaker at the first UPA conference. She is also co-founder of the Society for Technical Communication's SIG on Usability and a member of the Advisory Council for the private listserv on usability. Having the UPA conference in Minneapolis this year allows Ginny to connect her personal and professional communities; two of her grandchildren live in the Twin Cities.

Books by Ginny Redish

• A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (with Joseph Dumas)
  One of the major texts on usability, this book places usability testing squarely in the middle of a user-centered design approach (Buy on Amazon)
• User and Task Analysis for Interface Design (with JoAnn Hackos)
  In a poll, this book was one of the most often mentioned by practitioners as "a book I keep near my desk." (Buy on Amazon)