Ellen Butchart

Any path to my current position should be read and understood by reading the map backwards. I began my career as a college instructor in film studies and moved to CD-Rom producer because I was interested in making things again and the new fangled visual gui for computers opened up my pioneering imagination to the cinematic qualities of this platform. While working in educational CD-Rom production, I was entrenched in interactive media and the challenges of making lots and lots of information available to the learner...and that lead me to the internet. In order to ground my understanding in internet technologies (this was the late 1990's) I joined an enterprise software development company and began thinking about user interface design and tool development, then moved to Amazon and I broadened my thinking innovations in search, category, relational content and became a designer. Now I'm pulllng all of my interests and experiences together--narrative and the complexities of language, interactivity and rich media, organization and display of complex information for a diverse population of users and also usability of tools for content developers....