About the author Carol Barnum became a usability advocate in the early 1990s. It happened when she heard (and saw) the word "usability" in a session at a Society for Technical Communication conference. Technical communicators have always seen themselves as the user's advocate, but here was an emerging discipline that championed the cause of the user! It was love at first sight. In 1993, Carol attended the second Usability Professionals' Association conference, where she was thrilled to mix and mingle with several hundred usability folks on Microsoft's corporate campus. Those two