TABLE OF CONTENTS Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Corporation
Jonathan Grudin
Jonathan the Psychologist
Roles: Researcher, psychologist, use analyst
Goals: Understand the adoption, use, and effects of technologies and design methods
Objectives: Collect quantitative and qualitative data; find patterns, particu larly around problems and solutions; communicate the results to people who are most likely to find them useful
Classic quote:
Today s teenagers are the people who matter in the long run
Jonathan Grudin has worked as a developer and researcher in industry and as an academic at several universities, but throughout quite different jobs he has focused for the past twenty years on two related topics: (i) the dynamics of groups and organizations, especially those engaged in software development; and (ii) tools to support groups and organizations more broadly. As a senior researcher at Microsoft he has worked on ways to enhance streaming media, uses of multiple displays, uses of IM and weblogs, as well as understanding persona use in design.
In 1989 he left the consortium MCC in Austin, Texas to spend two years at Aarhus University in Denmark, intrigued by the Scandinavian participatory cooperative design approach and interested in how it might be applied to the development of commercial products. Despite being a fiction writer who had studied method acting, the idea of resorting to fictional stand-ins for the user-partners of participatory design did not occur to him, but when he encountered it a decade later at Microsoft he was motivated and positioned to delve into the mechanisms by which personas work,...
