My real education began at Washington University in St. Louis, where I double-majored in Mathematics and Psychology. Pretty weird combo, huh? Truth be told, I spent most of my time in Dr. Leonard Green's Learning & Behavior Laboratory, studying the application of economic theory to rats and pigeons (aka, behavioral economics). Really! No kidding!

I received my masters degree in Industrial Engineering from Virginia Tech. I concentrated on studying human-computer interaction in what is now called the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. My faculty advisor was Bob Williges.

My first projects at Virginia Tech involved conducting human factors research on voice recognition applications. I started by looking at three-dimensional response surface models for predicting recognition accuracy, and later looking at user-based error correction strategies. This work was done in 1982, and voice recognition was cutting-edge back then.

In 1983, I became a student intern, and then a full-time employee, in John Whiteside's Software Usability Engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation. Actually, the term "usability engineering" didn't even exist in 1983, and at the time the group's name was Human Engineering Research (HER). Sometime around 1985 we changed the name to Software Human Engineering (SUE), and then to Software Usability Engineering (SHE) in 1987 or so. We used to joke that the next group name should be "Bill or George, anything but Sue," but it ended up being the Usability Expertise Center (UEC - yuk! Nobody liked that name!).

We did some pretty cool things at Digital, including publishing the first paper which demonstrated the application of measurable usability goals in a real product development situation. I claim this was also the first published use and definition of the term usability engineering - and if you can find an earlier reference I'd love to hear about it. For the real curious among you, here's the citation:

Good, M., Spine, T.M., Whiteside, J., and George, P., User-derived impact analysis as a tool for usability engineering. Proceedings of the CHI’86 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference, ACM, Boston, April, 1986.

If you are really motivated, you can read the paper on Michael Good's web site.

We also did a lot of work at Digital on the application of ethnographic research methods to software development. Karen Holtzblatt joined our group somewhere around 1985 or 1986, and that resulted in the development of the techniques now known as Contextual Design.

Besides Karen, other alumni of the group at Digital include Dennis Wixon, Michael Good, Chauncey Wilson, Mary Beth Raven, Sandy Jones, Anne Smith Duncan, Eliot Tarlin, and Elisa DelGaldo. I learned a lot from all of them, and owe a lot to all of them.

On the product side of things at Digital, I was involved in many small and large product development efforts, including Digital's DECwindows program and, later, Digital's implementation of OSF/Motif. I was the chair of the OSF's Style Guide Working Group for about a two year stint during the development of Motif 1.1 and 1.2, as well as project leader for the DECwindows Companion to the OSF/Motif Style Guide. Some of the more fun product design efforts I was involved in include the DECwindows Bookreader, a graphical user interface for the VAX/VMS debugger, and the user interface for the VAX Notes conferencing system. I left Digital in 1994. Digital was purchased by Compaq in 1998, and then Compaq merged with Hewlett-Packard in 2001.

I did a one year stint as manager of the human factors team at Dun & Bradstreet Software (now called Geac Computer Corporation). Our team was responsible for the user interface design of the SmartStream client-server product platform and applications, which at that time included HR, financial, and manufacturing applications. One of the best things about my time at Dun & Bradstreet Software was creating a wonderful working partnership and friendship with Tara Scanlon.

I joined Sun Microsystems in December, 1995. The first project I worked on was Solstice Network Client. This product, no longer available, was a client-based solution for PC-Unix connectivity. The core of it was PC-NFS, which allowed PC clients to access Unix file systems, as well as print to Unix printers. My job was to clean up a horrendous installation and configuration mess. We have data which indicates that support call rates were cut by about 45% compared to the predecessor product, so I claim success.

I next worked on the Solaris PC NetLink project. Where Solstice Network Client was a client-based solution to PC-Unix interoperability, Solaris PC NetLink is a server-based solution. In short, it allows native Windows NT network services to run on Solaris. My primary job on this project was to design the management user interface, an application known as Solaris PC NetLink Server Manager.

I was also a primary contributor to Java Look and Feel Guidelines: Advanced Topics, which was published in 2001. If you have any issues with the Menus chapter you can blame me.

From November, 2000 to June, 2002 I was involved in bringing about corporate-wide user interface consistency in Sun's system management products and offerings. And, oh yea, in my spare time I managed the Solaris Human Computer Interaction group based in Burlington, MA.

Symantec's Enterprise Security Products division lured me away from Sun in June, 2002. I'm not sure I will ever know what really happened, but I was attracted by the offer of a job in Nashua, NH. After seven years of hour-long commutes into Massachusetts, I had an opportunity for a 20-minute commute in New Hampshire. No more state income tax! Even better, the work was right up my alley - user interface design for Symantec's new enterprise security management console.

Alas, it was not meant to be. Six weeks into the job the local VP announced that Symantec was closing the Nashua, NH office and moving our jobs to Waltham, MA. I was outraged. I was recruited based on the job being in Nashua. Although I knew there was an office in Waltham, I made it very clear I had no interest in the position if it entailed significant amounts of time in Waltham; the commute from my home to Waltham would be nothing short of hell. Right before accepting the job, I was assured "it's a Nashua gig." Was I lied to, deliberately mislead, or just shown only some of the facts? Who knows, and it doesn't much matter anymore.

Nevertheless, in the eleven weeks that I worked at Symantec I had some fun. I didn't get to do a whole lot on the management console, but instead spent the majority of my time designing the user interface for version 8.0 of Symantec Enterprise Firewall and related Firewall/VPN solutions. It would have been a great gig had it stayed in Nashua.

IBM came to the rescue, and I took a position with the IBM Software Group (well, really Lotus Software) in October, 2002.

For my first two years at IBM, I worked as an individual contributor on various aspects of IBM Workplace, an attempt at a new generation of collaboration software. In the first release development cycle, I was the lead designer for the Workplace application "catalog" portlets, as well as the Workplace application templates themselves. In the second release, I was the lead designer for Lotus Workplace Builder. For release 2.5, I split my time between being the overall Web experience lead designer for Workplace, and chairing an IBM-wide work group working on Web application guidelines.

In January, 2005, I moved back into management. My group was called End User and Client Design, and were responsible for the user experience design of, among other things, the next major version of Lotus Notes, code named Hannover. This project is a significant and major user interface overhaul of Lotus Notes. Another major project in my group was the product design of the recently announced Sametime 7.5. Sametime is IBM's enterprise instant messaging and Web conference software. Together, Hannover and Sametime 7.5 give a pretty good indication of where the product design team is attempting to take IBM's end user software. If you google "Lotus Notes Hannover" and "Sametime 7.5", you might find some interesting stuff out there.

In the end, though, the gig at IBM just wasn't right for me. Despite working in the collaboration software area, and despite many fine friends and colleagues, I left IBM in June, 2006.

I joined Autodesk in July, 2006. I am manager of product design for civil engineering CAD products, notably Autodesk Civil 3D. I have a small, diverse team of desigers, including folks with background (and professional certification) in civil engineering, and land surveying. Civil 3D may be at once both the most complicated and the coolest software I have ever worked on. I'm having a blast. Autodesk is a cool company in many of the same ways that Digital and Sun were cool companies. The folks I work with on a day to day basis are simply a great bunch of folks. I'm having a great time, and that says a lot.