sinéad's lifestream

Back when I was studying for my degree and my masters I always got really excited about any project or essay that allowed me to read and reference the work of Dr. Jennifer Preece. If you have studied interaction design you will no doubt have come across her book “Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction” but the work of Dr. Preece that always completely absorbed me was her perspectives on the relationship between usability and sociability, particularly the impact of usability on the design and management of online communities.

If I could choose any person to be my research mentor it would be Dr. Preece. This woman has a 35 page CV online describing her incredible academic career. As early as 1975 she was working on e-learning initiatives in the UK and after completing her PhD studies in 1985 she pursued research focused on ground-breaking topics such as information systems, computer mediated communication, human?computer interaction, and online communities. She eventually moved to the USA in 1996 to lecture in the University of Maryland Baltimore County, in the Information Systems Department. Today she is the Dean of this department, supporting a long list of PhD students. Her work has taken her all around the globe, she has published hundreds of papers and authored numerous HCI books. She has achieved so much, in what had been a traditionally male dominated field. Her career is certainly something to aspire to.

The Only Real Social Media Expert

Dr. Preece’s current research focuses on the design and management of digital social media, and it’s quite possible that Dr. Preece is one of the only people qualified to call themselves an actual “social media expert”. Back in 2000 when social media was just a glint in Biz Stone and Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes Dr. Preece was hard at work bringing together the usability focus of human-computer interaction and the broader human focus of sociability. She introduced the significance of understanding the interrelationships between people’s behaviour online, sociability and usability. She illustrated how people’s interactions create online communities, and that developers can influence their success or failure by how they design software and polices. This was a novel approach that she continues to pursue today.

I would love to bump into Dr. Preece someday, but it’s not because I would love to pick her brain about all of these fascinating topics we share an interest in. Instead I would ask her to tell me her story, because I bet it’s an incredible one.

This post was written for Ada Lovelace Day – an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.