Janice Redish

Janice "Ginny" Redish is an American usability researcher and writer sometimes referred to as the "mother of usability studies".

Biography Redish graduated from Bryn Mawr College and holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University.

She founded one of the first independent usability test laboratories in the United States of America in 1985, monitoring users who would test new user interfaces and document templates. The lab was created at the request of IBM who wanted an outside, independent lab for testing software and documentation.

Awards and affiliations 1995 - RIGO Award from ACM, SIGDOC 1998 - Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication 1998 - President's Award, Usability Professionals Association 2001 - Goldsmith Award - IEEE - Alfred N. Goldsmith Award, Professional Communication Society 2004 - President's Award, Society for Technical Communication 2005 - Myron L. White Award, University of Washington, Department of Technical Communication 2005 - First award as the Outstanding Plain Language Leader in the Private Sector, Center for Plain Language 2008 - Ken R. Rainey Award for Excellence in Research, Society for Technical Communication 2013 - Lifetime Achievement Award, User Experience Professionals Association A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (with Joseph S Dumas) Exeter, England; Portland, Or. : Intellect Books, 1999 Review, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 26, No. 1, (1996): 97 Review, Technical communication. 42, no. 2, (1995): 361 Review, IEEE Transactions On Professional Communication Pc, 38, No. 1, (1995): 45 User and Task Analysis for Interface Design (with JoAnn T Hackos) New York : Wiley, 1998.