Janice "Ginny" Redish is an American usability

Usability

Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object. The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, or anything a human interacts with. A usability study may be conducted as a primary job function by a usability analyst or as a secondary job...

 writer and consultant. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....

 and holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

.

Career

In 1979, she founded the Document Design Centre at the American Institutes for Research in Washington D.C. and remained there as Director for thirteen years. The aim of the DDC was to streamline workplace documents for government agencies and major private companies by developing online document template models. She founded one of the first independent usability test laboratories in the United States of America in 1985, monitoring users who would test new interfaces and document templates for the multinationals such as IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 and Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...

 among others.

From 1992 onwards, she has worked as an independent consultant for government agencies and multinationals on usability and documentation. She has published three books on the subject, of effective writing, usability studies, and web communication, one of which has been translated into Chinese.

Awards and Affiliations

• 1995 - RIGO Award
• ACM, SIGDOC
  SIGDOC
  SIGDOC is the Special Interest Group on Design of Communication of the Association for Computing Machinery .-Mission:The mission of SIGDOC includes:* Promoting the professional development of its members....
  
  
• 2001 - Goldsmith Award
• IEEE, Professional Communication Society

Books

• Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works Elsevier/Kaufmann, 2007 ISBN 9780123694867 ; in over 400 WorldCat libraries
  • Translated into Chinese by Dongni Wang as 胜于言传 : 网站内容制胜宝典 / Sheng yu yan zhuan : Wang zhan nei rong zhi sheng bao dian, 机械工业出版社, Beijing : Ji xie gong ye chu ban she, 2009. ISBN 9787111264507
  • Review, Journal of Web Librarianship, 2, no. 4 (2008): 607-608
  • Review, Journal Of Technical Writing And Communication, 39, No. 1, (2009): 113-118
• A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (with Joseph S Dumas) Exeter, England ; Portland, Or. : Intellect Books, 1999 ISBN 9781841500201, in over 300 libraries according to WorldCat
  • 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. ISBN 9780471178316 iun 390 libraries, according to WorldCat
  • Review, Journal- American Society For Information Science, 49, No. 14, (1998): 1334
  • Review, IEEE transactions on professional communication. 42, no. 3, (1999): 188

External Links

• Official website, Redish and Associates