Mick is President and co-founder of EchoUser. He is driven to improve human experience wherever possible. Before EchoUser Mick worked for 15 years advancing user testing and design methods, creating UI Standards, and defining corporate usability benchmarking processes. He is expanding his philosophy at EchoUser to innovate experiences for users and customers, whoever they may be and whatever they may be doing.

Career

• Usability Measurement: Mick has worked extensively on usability measurement to greatly improve its validity, robustness, and reliability. Usability is notoriously difficult to measure. The basis of Mick's research is that usability (and more generally, the quality of an experience) is ultimately expressed inside a user. For example, driving experience may depend in part on the MPG of the car, the color, the size of engine, the number of seats, the amount of sales, etc. But the visceral feeling of driving can only be found in a person's mind. All of Mick's work aims to tap into and measure these visceral sensations that dictate success or failure for so much product and service design.
• Rapid Iterative Testing & Evaluation (the RITE method): Rapid iterative testing and design is central to successful application development, whether the process is agile or traditional.
• Human Experience: Human experience extends well beyond the software world. Improving the experience of public transportation riders, hardware installers, and limousine passengers are all experiences that Mick has worked on.
• Mobile UI Design Standards: Mick worked for several years designing applications and corporate UI standards for mobile applications. He has worked on PDAs, voice interactive applications, smart phones, (not-so-smart) WAP phones, pagers, and laptops. Mick was awarded Patent #6,772,173, System and Method for Dynamically Presenting a List of Items for work on cell phone UI.
• Voice Interactive Email: Mick worked extensively on design and usability for a voice interactive email application. Voice interactive software is a unique design environment needing solid understanding of the differences from "screen-based" design. For example, information presented by voice is transient, it's spoken, then its gone. Mick designed and developed a sophisticated prototype that allowed rapid changes in email design that was the focal point of development.
• User Centered Design Process: Mick played a lead role in defining end-to-end UCD process for SAP. The process had there main phases: Understanding the User (needs analysis, user research, etc.), Defining the Interaction (use cases), and Designing the UI (design and usability testing), As part of this system, Mick developed a system and tools to benchmark usability across the company.

Publications

• Medlock, M., Wixon, D., McGee, M., and Welsh, D. (2005). The Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation Method (RITE): Better Products in Less Time. In Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew (Eds.), Cost-Justifying Usability, edition 2.
• McGee, M., Rich, A., Dumas, J. (2004). Understanding the Usability Construct: User-Perceived Usability. Proceedings Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 907-911.
• Rich, A., McGee, M. (2004). Expected Usability Magnitude Estimation. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 912-916.
• McGee, M. (2004). Master Usability Scaling: Magnitude Estimation and Master Scaling Applied to Usability Measurement. CHI Proceedings, 335-342.
• McGee. M. (2003). Usability Magnitude Estimation. Proceedings Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 691-695.
• Hix, D., Swan, J., Gabbard, J., McGee, M., Durbin, J., and King, R. (1999). User-Centered Design and Evaluation of a Real-Time Battlefield Visualization Virtual Environment. Proceedings IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium, 96-103. -- (Awarded best conference paper)
• McGee, M. (1998). Using Psychophysics to Measure Negative Side Effects in Immersive Virtual Environments. Proceedings Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 1501-1505.
• McGee, M., Neale, D. C., Amento, B. S., Brooks, P. C. (1998). Telepresence in ACTV Media Spaces. Proceedings Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 409-413.