Cherri M. Pancake on Usability Engineering
Ubiquity,
Jun 04, 2002
With a name like Cherri M. Pancake you may be tempted to think of her as the Faith Popcorn of usability. You may grow even more sceptical when you read that her qualifications include six years studying the Mayan Indians at the Ixchel Ethnological Museum in Guatemala. But such preconceptions would be a mistake, at least to judge from this interview. Pancake approaches usability from an ethnographic point of view, meaning that she is able to get beyond the simplistic Nielsen approach to usability and to look at the way different cultures look at information representation. The ethnographic approach also entails a more observational approach to usability. "You do 'in situ' studies, observing how people live and work. You may ask questions to elicit information about what's happening, but you don't ask leading questions." In this interview she describes different approaches to source code design, which from my experience in the vield, establish her credentials.
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