Concurrent 4B: What Our Readers Actually do on Scholarly Publication Sites….

Andrea Kravetz joined Elsevier in May 2001 as the Vice President of the User Centered Design Department (UCD). The UCD department at Elsevier is a global team with members located in six countries. Under Andrea’s leadership members of the UCD team have been involved in all major electronic product releases for Elsevier including: ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, SciVerse, MD Consult and Brain Navigator. The members of the team work closely with users to conduct ethnographic research and with product managers to design usable products. Usability testing is conducted on most products prior to release.

In 2000 Andrea was employed as a Vice President of Professional Services at Invisible Worlds located in San Francisco, CA. Invisible Worlds created protocols for the transport of metadata.

Prior to joining Elsevier, Andrea was employed at LexisNexis, (a Reed Elsevier company) in Dayton, Ohio. She worked in a variety of departments at LexisNexis including Data Development and Large Law Firm Marketing. She was also the product manager for several key products including: Lexcite, Freestyle Natural Language Search, Company Dossier and the Nexis News indexing taxonomy.

Andrea is a licensed lawyer and practiced law in Ohio for several years before joining Reed Elsevier.

She is a frequent lecturer on the user centered design process and the value of incorporating the user into the development process.

Kirsten Robinson is a user experience architect who conducts research with technology users and creates and evaluates user interfaces with a focus on usability. She currently works for Endeca Technologies, a leading supplier of online search and guided navigation software. In the past, she has worked on online publication design and evaluation projects for CrossRef, Publishing Technology, Ingenta and McGraw-Hill. She holds a MS in Human Factors from Bentley University and a BA in Cognitive Science from Brown University

Lisa Horowitz has worked as a librarian for almost 17 years, 14 of which were in various positions at MIT. As of last July, she is MIT Libraries’ Assessment Librarian, developing, coordinating and overseeing assessment efforts across the Libraries. As part of this position, she acts as assessment specialist within the newly formed User Experience group, where she has recently participated in an ethnographic study in multiple parts, focusing in particular on how new technologies and formats are having an impact on how MIT scholars find, use, and share information for their study, research, and publishing. She has a BA from Dartmouth College, an MLS from Rutgers University, and an MA from the University of Pennsylvania in comparative literature and literary theory.