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By Tom Beazley, Student Member
The Lone Star Chapter held its monthly meeting on March 13th at the Crown Plaza North Dallas/Addison Hotel. The featured speaker was Dr. Carol M. Barnum, a professor of technical communication at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia, and the author of many books, including Usability Testing and Research (Longman 2002).
Chapter President Kathryn Poe began the evening promptly at 6:30 by welcoming everyone and by introducing visitors. About eight students from the University of North Texas' Graduate Technical Writing program were present, along with chapter member Dr. Lynne M. Cooke of the UNT faculty. Dr. Gail Lippincott of the UNT English faculty was also present.
For this joint meeting, several members of the Usability Professional Association (UPA) were present. Mrs. Poe invited the UPA's Jim Carlsen-Landy to the platform to greet the crowd of about 50 people. Following Mr. Carlsen-Landy, Louellen Coker, a recent graduate of the technical writing program at the University of North Texas, thanked the Chapter for the scholarship she was awarded. Saying it was time to give back to the STC, Ms. Coker announced that she is running for second vice president of the Lone Star Chapter .Past President Michelle Knoerzer then appealed for volunteers to staff booths at the STC's 50th Annual Conference in May. (If anyone wishes to volunteer, please contact her at mknoerzerlsc@aol.com.)
After Ms. Knoerzer's appeal for volunteers, the banquet portion of the meeting began. The wait staff served an elegant meal of grilled chicken breast fillet, rice, rolls, tea, coffee, and key lime pie.
Following the banquet, about 15 more people arrived to hear Dr. Barnum speak about usability testing. She illustrated her opening point, "usability testing can make a difference in the product and in the documentation," by showing in her PowerPoint presentation a slide of the infamous Florida "butterfly" punch ballot that generated so much controversy in the 2000 Presidential election. After discussing how user testing can reveal problems, she explained why a user-centered design is the best design. She then contrasted two different ways to evaluate a product's effectiveness: using heuristic evaluation in which designers use a set of criteria to evaluate their own products, and using actual users to test a product. She also emphasized that "the single most important factor that most often leads to unusable software is communication failure within the project team."
Following Dr. Barnum's lecture, a drawing was held to determine three winners of a raffle that was held to raise money for our chapter's scholarship fund. Dale Erickson won a copy of Technical Writing 101, compliments of Johnson Printing. UNT student Louellen Coker won a copy of X-Engineering the Corporation, by James Champy, compliments of Perot Systems. UPA member Cathy Nelle won a copy of Dr. Barnum's latest book, Usability Testing and Research.