is a Staff Usability Specialist at UserWorks. Since joining UserWorks in November, 2000, Mr. Steinberg has supported a number of usability studies, both in-house usability testing and online user surveys. He has evaluated user response to technical documentation, equipment installation procedures, hardware configuration, and Web page customization for clients such as Verizon, the U.S. Department of Education, and the State of Maryland.
Mr. Steinberg received his Masters of Arts in psycholinguistics from Northwestern University. His research, funded in part by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, focused on developing rules to allow speech synthesis and voice recognition systems to reproduce and recognize differences in pause, syllable lengthening, and intonation patterns as cues to differences in otherwise ambiguous sentences. The research used spectrographic analysis of speech waveforms, speech production and perception experiments, response coding, and multivariate logistic regression. While engaged in this study, Mr. Steinberg became interested in applying speech research to human factors issues, such as the effectiveness of call center customer service interactions and the persuasiveness of sales and courtroom presentations. This interest led him to discover and examine a distinction between those intonation patterns used by speakers to identify new information to audiences and those expressive of speaker interest in already familiar information.
Before coming to UserWorks, Mr. Steinberg conducted customer service evaluations, mystery shopping, and customer intercept studies for Galli Research Services in Chicago, where he tested and helped redesign questionnaires to eliminate ambiguity. At the Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin, Illinois, he analyzed the workplace procedures and financial transactions of cage workers, change people, money runners, and dealers from the standpoint of security, efficiency, and potential for error, and developed suggestions for streamlining operations.
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