TecEd founder and CEO Stephanie Rosenbaum will be honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) International this June at the UXPA 2022 conference in San Diego (UXPA2022.org).
One UXPA Lifetime Achievement Award is given each year, and Stephanie will be the 12th winner of this award since its inception in 2009. The award recognizes “individuals who through a lifetime of achievements have contributed to the UXPA and/or to the field of User Experience.”
After a few years, “I realized that no matter how good a job you did at explaining how something worked to its user community, that wasn’t good enough. Because if what the target audience had to experience was confusing and user-hostile, you could write the Encyclopedia Britannica and all you would have would be another not very usable aspect of the product.
“If I thought the need for clear communication was desperate when I started TecEd in 1967, it was much more desperate by the mid-1980s. We needed to take a step up the food chain and make sure that the products, systems, and eventually websites and apps were themselves usable. So TecEd went back to school. We went to SIGCHI and Human Factors Society meetings, and we read the literature. We hired more people with Cognitive Psychology backgrounds and Human-Computer Interaction backgrounds, but those organizations and degrees were heavily focused on academia rather than practice.”
An early advocate of designing for the user, in 1989 Stephanie was one of the authors in the first special issue of any professional journal on usability. Shortly thereafter, she guest-lectured on participant selection at one of the first university courses on usability. Participant selection and recruiting continue to be a TecEd focus: Stephanie comments, “If you’re not doing UX research with the people who are actually your target audience, you collect a lot of data with no idea if you can trust it.”
But Stephanie’s involvement with UX began long before user experience was formalized as the profession it is today. When she founded TecEd, its main focus was user assistance—her team created online help and instructional materials for mainframe computers, at the time when computers were first moving from laboratories into the business world. Suddenly thousands of novice users were struggling to understand systems developed by engineers for other engineers.
Charter Member of the UPA (now UXPA)
Therefore Stephanie became a charter member of UXPA, formerly the Usability Professionals Association (UPA), when it was founded in 1991. She was involved in UPA’s formation during Birds-of-a-Feather sessions at the ACM SIGCHI and Human Factors Society conferences in 1990, where founder Janice James encouraged discussions among UX practitioners who were being under-served by academic conferences in the field.
The new organization admirably addressed the needs of UX practitioners, and Stephanie attended every UPA conference from its 1991 inception to 2012—as well as almost all the recent UXPA conferences. She has presented papers, workshops, or tutorials at most of the UPA/UXPA conferences, citing client project examples in multi-varied industries – from health sciences, technology, education, and consumer products to automotive. This year she will be speaking about managing successful multinational UX research.
The original 50-member UPA group where Stephanie was an active member has grown to serve a community that includes nearly 2,400 members worldwide. It promotes UX concepts and techniques through its annual international conference, its 59 local UXPA chapters in 30 countries around the world, and by publishing new UX findings through both the Journal of Usability Studies (JUS) and User Experience Magazine.
