Michael Levi and Frederick Conrad are co-authors of "A Heuristic Evaluation of a World Wide Web Prototype" (interactions Magazine, July/August 1996) and "Usability Testing of World Wide Web Sites" (accepted for publication by Software Development Magazine.) They have spoken on the topic of usability testing and the World Wide Web to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the Software Psychology Society, and the Annual Research Conference of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Mr. Levi is a project manager at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), where he led the development of the BLS Web site. A past chair of the BLS User Interface Working Group, Mr. Levi was instrumental in the development of HCI guidelines for BLS interactive systems, as well as the design and implementation of an internal HCI training curriculum for BLS analysts. He has developed and taught numerous classes and seminars on user interface design, programming strategies, languages, and operating systems. He has organized and participated in panels and presentations to organizations such as the Software Psychology Society, the American Statistical Association, the Association of Public Data Users, and the Labor Market Information Conference. In addition, Mr. Levi has given scores of workshops in the Washington, DC, area on other topics: nonviolence, consensus decision making, organizing for change, and team building.
Dr. Conrad is a cognitive psychologist in the Office of Survey Methods Research at BLS. His current work concerns the development and evaluation of methods for collecting and disseminating statistical data. This recently included evaluating the usability of a pen-computer based survey instrument for collecting information for the Consumer Price Index. His non-HCI work often involves human-human interaction. For example, he has recently investigated how structured versus conversational survey interviews affect the accuracy of people's responses.
He received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1986 and for the next three years conducted post-doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University on the acquisition of programming skills. His final stop before BLS was in the AI Research Group at Digital Equipment Corporation. Dr. Conrad has published his work in such journals as Cognitive Science, Journal of Memory and Language, Psychological Review and Cognition and Brain Science. He has authored chapters in several edited volumes and is co-editor of Intersections in Basic and Applied Memory Research, published in December, 1996.
