Who am I?

In my professional life, I’ve advanced degrees in engineering and psychology, and my business card aptly identifies me as an “engineering psychologist,” but usually I say I’m a human factors engineer, a field I’ve worked in since 1995. I’ve done HF work in telecommunications, office automation, and, currently, transportation. Before that, I spent a few years as an adjunct professor in psychology at a couple universities.

What Am I Really Up To?

Working as I do today in airplane cockpits and locomotive cabs is way cool, if I don’t mind saying so, but I have this inexplicable passion for plain old personal computer UI design that doesn’t get fully satisfied at my current job. So, instead I just bore my colleagues at the lunch table with my rants.

My inaugural post gives the motivation for this site, but my personal agenda is this: I find myself seeing things that may look good or bad, but infrequently having chances to actually test them and my academic training makes me want data to verify my impressions. My hope is to encourage researchers and practitioners to take ideas from this site and go through the really hard work of testing and developing them into working UIs. Just please get back to me to tell me how it works on real users.

If nothing else, I think this site will be worth a laugh or two. And my lunch mates will appreciate being left alone.

How to Contact Me

Write to me at zuschlag at fast dash mail dot org.

Obligatory Disclaimer

Everything here in this site is my personal opinion and does not represent the policies or position of my employer, the United States Department of Transportation, the US government, or any agency thereof.

Obligatory Portrait

Oh, and Jakob Nielsen says blogs should always have a photo of the author, and we all know that Nielsen is always right, so here it is: 

This site copyright © by Michael Zuschlag. All rights reserved. All photos and drawings are by me, unless attributed to someone else in the Alt tag and/or image.