Elspeth Golden (Elsa), HCII. (Advisors, Bonnie John, Len Bass)
Graduated (5/10)
Dissertation Title-Early-Stage Software Design For Usability

Elsa received a B.A. in History (cum laude) from the University of California at Santa Barbara.  Her professional background is in commercial software development, and her ultimate goal is to improve quality of life, both personal and professional, as well as competitive capability, for professional software engineers and architects.  She hopes to achieve this by developing methods and techniques that will help software engineering to more closely approach the standards of other engineering disciplines, and by finding ways to effectively teach such methods to software engineering students and professionals.
At present, Elsa is working on the Usability and Software Architecture (U&SA) project in HCII. Her research focuses on developing methods to help software architects address usability concerns, and on finding ways to effectively teach such methods to software engineers and architects.  A experiment she performed during the summer shows promising initial results in this direction, and she and her colleagues continue to move forward with further analysis and experimentation.