Too late in my working life to have any effect on my work, I took a class from Richard I Anderson, a survey of user-centered design and usability research, which at the time were relatively new. Designers were relying on their own instincts or copying from others who dominated the market, and more often than not Computer Science curriculum never included the possibility that we were making our users’ lives more difficult by imposing our views on them of how they should interact with our creations. To make matters worse, our employers insulated departments from each other, and conflicts would arise about “who owns the user.” Was it the industrial designer, hired by Marketeers to entice consumers to buy the product, or the Engineer who applied their techniques to the best of their knowledge? I was neither of them, relying mostly on intuition (not really great either), and never being able to impose my views (I came to specialize in fixing other people’s software because I could take it home and rewrite it with clarity, …