Many Thanks to Dr. Betsy Comstock for advocating for users, and congratulations to her on her retirement
Mary Beth Raven November 15 2009
My friend and colleague, Betsy Comstock has decided to retire from IBM. I wish her the best, and I also want to thank her
for her excellent work, including some innovative usability methods, over the years.
This posting is a collection of good wishes form her colleagues. Please feel free to post a response as well if you'd like.
Betsy was the lead user researcher/usability person for Notes 8. In that capacity, she and I worked closely together.
Betsy did the interviews and other research to create our persona Ted Amado, a VIP of marketing at renovations. She was one of the driving forces behind our
"Renovations on the road" usability testing approach-- where we brought laptops to folks like you, at customer sites, and did usability testing.
Many of you have met and worked with Betsy -- she has been active in the UX lab at Lotusphere, the Lotus leadership Alliance, and the PSM Seminar.
Betsy brought passion and professionalism to her job. Betsy, thank you for all you have done for the Notes design team, and the thousands of Notes client users who benefit from your work. I will miss you terribly.
I worked with Betsy when I first joined IBM helping to bring easy to use dashboards and scorecards to our customers. She always had users top of mind in all her decisions, and she truly is an advocate for our customers. Aside from her current work, she made some great strides in user experience throughout her career and has been a terrific role model. She is a wonderful person to work with, and I hope she enjoys her well deserved retirement!
From Ted Amado VIP of Marketing Renovations "If you need it, we got it, for only a small mark up." |
Dear Dr. Comstock,
It is with very mixed feelings that I and all your friends at Renovations greeted the news of your impending retirement. Yes, we are happy that you are off to greener pastures, but you leave us all that much the poorer for it. Particularly myself, for without you I would literally be nothing more than a piece of clip art in a bin. You gave me life, provided me with a beautiful family, a fantastic career, and a hot marketing assistant. I can almost forgive you for also saddling me with an Attila-the-Hun clone as an administrative assistant. Just goes to show you have a sense of humor.
And I want you to know that I have always appreciated how you stood up for me. Through the scandals, the aspersions cast on my character, the jibes regarding my intelligence, I could always count on you to refute whatever damning charge was hurled my way. If the Feds hadn't raided my bank account I would buy you that RV myself. As it is, well, how's your Swiss-German?
In closing, you have been a friend and true companion and you will be missed.
Betsy -
Thank you for all the hard work! I'll always remember your taking the time to help me brainstorm and construct usability tests even though the tests weren't related to your immediate focus area. You're truly a user advocate and your passion and commitment to the usability issues we found was contagious. I'm thankful that I had so many opportunities to work with you. I wish you the best and I hope that you'll keep in touch.
You have been such a strong advocate for our users -- thank you for all your hard work keeping our designs on track for what people really need!
I want to thank Betsy for helping me make the transition from academics into industry. Way back when I was making the transition, Betsy was kind enough to grant an informational interview while she was at DEC. The pearls of wisdom that she passed along that day were immensely helpful and have continued to be helpful at various points in my career. And of course, as colleagues at IBM, Betsy continued to be helpful whenever I had a question. I could always count on a thoughtful analysis whenever we talked. Good luck on your retirement -- I hope you continue to find inspiration!
Betsy - Congratulations on your retirement. It has been a pleasure working with you over the last few years. I think the icon study we did was one of the most fun projects I have had the opportunity to work on. Thanks a lot and good luck..
When I think of Betsy Comstock, I think of the many eventful site visits we went on together... I think of the Notes 8 Collaboratory we ran down at Lotusphere, the Integration station for walk-up and use participants, the CHI paper, the Usability Scorecard, and countless other things we worked on together. Betsy joined our team just before the redesign of Notes 8 and she became the UR team lead at that time. Betsy led by collaborating and by making sure everyone had a voice and that the action we took reflected the team's goals and desires. As a remote team member, the biggest thing that I relied on, continuously, was the frank, open, honest communication she inspired, the updates she provided, and the amazingly effective brainstorming we did and the accomplishments it led to. Most of the big impact items we achieved came out of our team piggy backing off of each other (no pun intended). The renovations on the road testing was born during one of these meetings which helped standardize our formal lab testing using the fictitious Renovations environment and was used once Notes 8 was built and ready for testing. Our team had synergy, motivation, respect, and pride and we accomplished a LOT!
Things I will never forget include: the blood, sweat and tears of maintaining the piggy laptops, the woflden server and the lab computers... receiving emails full of tables and doc links for items Betsy wanted to close in the scorecard, and several clever, animated, slide decks with as many pictures of us as she could fit in them! : ) I have mental images of Betsy eating soup, loving chocolate and ice cream as much as I do, and always greeting people with a big smile and a warm hello.
Betsy, I will miss learning from you, collaborating with you and talking with you regularly. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors and look forward to hearing all about them. Please stay in touch and enjoy this next chapter of your life.
Betsy and I have worked together for a number of years, including several years prior to us both joining IBM. It has always been a pleasure to work with her - she is a enthusiastic, curious, easy to team with, a great communicator, and a highly accomplished user researcher. If I've ever been stumped about how to approach a user research problem, I could always consult Betsy and she would be able to -- apparently without effort -- come up with some innovative method and a clear rationale for using it.
Betsy led the Notes 8 user research team during the period when Notes 8 was being designed. Out of the many accomplishments coming from that team, the one that I think was most significant was increased contact with end users. Getting feedback from line-of-business end users can be difficult - after all, they are the folks whose valuable time is spent conducting the company's business. However, Betsy led the team over a number of hurdles to gather an impressive amount of end user feedback on Notes 8. Betsy has been a passionate and articulate "voice of the user", and her advocacy helped to shape a landmark product.
Betsy, best wishes on your retirement - you will be missed; however, I'm also sure that, going forward, whatever you turn your hand to will benefit. Take care and please stay in touch.
Dear Betsy, We will miss you and wish you all the very best. Please keep in touch.
Betsy, your dedication to making Lotus software products usable for our end users will be missed! Your leadership, persistence and perseverance in making the "integration station" a reality for Lotusphere 2009 was extraordinary! It was a pleasure to have an opportunity to work with you. I wish you the very best in your retirement endeavors. I know you will be successful. Very best wishes, Kathryn
A huge thank you and sad good-bye to Betsy for the dedication and high quality innovative work she brought to the Notes client and her other projects. Her enthusiastic advocacy of customer needs and willingness to share her expertise and research with the rest of the team will be missed!
I worked with Betsy on Protector for Notes. This was a project that I jumped into with little background. Betsy was amazing at providing clarity to myself and I think
to the whole group. She has a great talent for getting down to the details that other might not think of. I enjoyed working with her very much and I'm sad to see her
go. Our loss. Congratulations Betsy!
Deb Maurer, Betsy and I began working together a little over four years ago at the start of Notes 8. Thanks to Betsy as our team lead, we quickly formed a strong team with a plan and goals to strengthen the product. While working closely together, I have learned so much from her and truly enjoyed myself. Some of my group memories include:
Our visit to Herman Miller (sticky note writing at tables in the hotel and the first prioritization exercise we had done), DST Output and some of our first Renovations on the Road testing (and a stop at a fantastic deli on the way home), multiple Lotuspheres (and countless hours in my office preparing for the integration station at Lotusphere 2009), multiple other conferences (which has led to an expected user research presence at them).
Betsy and I have noticed over the years that if there are two ways of doing something, she prefers one and I prefer the other...and still we've worked so well together (I still maintain categories are better than flat lists..:-) I will miss working with Betsy, seeing her and spending time together while in the office.
Thank you for everything and best of luck, Betsy. I will require frequently updated pictures from all your future travels.
It is a great pity to lose another great user research person in Lotus. Betsy, I really enjoyed working together with you and learning from you, as a college and also as a friend. I will miss those lunches that we had together at the cafeteria, where you always had soup :-) . And I will miss those various discussions we had, about work and about life.
But I am also very happy for your great plan after retirement. All best wishes to You! Maybe we will see your documentary at some independent film festival in the future :-)
Thanks for teaching us how to listen
I have only worked with Betsy in the last six months. During this time, I have learned from Betsy how she gathers feedback from users during interviews and surveys. What impressed me the most was Betsy's ability to listen and observe allowing her to build a conclusion from the data gathered instead of only reinforcing the hypothesis. Betsy is also a great teacher, she provided guidance to a group of RIT interns who needed to gather user data but could not schedule interviews. Betsy helped create a short survey which was open and able to gather critical feedback without restricting users answers.
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This presentation, that we gave at the CHI conference in 2009, summarized many of the contributions Betsy made:
http://www.slideshare.net/BetsyComstock/open-by-design-how-ibm-partnered-with-the-user-community-in-the-redesign-of-lotus-notes-1294815
Here are a few photos of Betsy at work over the years.
Prioritization activity for Notes 8.5
Miki and Betsy getting the "integration station" ready for Lotusphere 2009
Well done, Betsy! Enjoy your well-deserved retirement.
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