Technical Team

John Smelcer, PhD, CUA
Project Director

Job at HFI

• Deliver quality
• Understand users and what they do
• Manage projects

Experience

John has many years of experience in usable software design and usability research. He is also experienced in project management and IT management. He has taught extensively at the graduate and undergraduate levels. His usability experience covers the spectrum from task modeling and empirical research to user-centered design, expert reviews, and usability testing. Target systems include e-commerce sites, public web sites, call center software, and client/server GUI design.

Education

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Ph.D., Computer and Information Systems
Dissertation: Understanding User Errors in Database Query

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
M.B.A., Information Systems
B.S., Computer Science

Favorite Projects

Call centers – absolutely. Hardest to do, clearest benefit for users, biggest ROI for management.

Financials. And Health Care. And Automotive. Aw, heck. I love 'em all.

Areas of Interest and Design Orientation

Design, manage, UI research, teaching,... the full range of systems work

Philosophies:
The Zen of Usability

• Persistence – never give up.
  Know when you're in over your head.
• The devil's in the details.
  Don't lose the big picture
• Hands-on is the way to manage
  Delegate as much as you can
• Users are the experts – they know their job better than their boss
  Users are novices – they don't know how to design.

Favorite Vehicle

Trek road bike

Favorite Pastimes

Reliving childhood with my son – biking, Boy Scouts, cooking, projects, flying model airplanes and rockets.

Favorite Food

Indian. No, Thai. No, Mexican. Yes, all of the above.

Character

Persistent, methodical, animated, not afraid to jump into the infinite abyss.

Technical Team