gradPSYCH - September 2011 - (Page 10)
ODD JOBS
Meet a Google
User experience researcher Dawn Shaikh is helping craft the next generation of Web fonts.
psychologist
spent a week in New York earlier this year interviewing Ethiopic experts and asking native speakers to evaluate a mock-up of Ethiopic’s characters and spacing on a mobile device. She’ll pass data to designers and engineers who are creating the Ethiopic font, which Google will own but anyone will be able to use. “We have a saying on our team, ‘What’s good for the Web is good for Google,’” says Shaikh. “By creating more fonts, we are enabling more content we can index on our search engine.” Times New Roman, meet “The Girl Next Door”: The other half of her job involves running studies for Google’s Web fonts team, a group that’s creating new typefaces to liven up online content, distinguished by such quirky monikers as “Cherry Cream Soda” and “The Girl Next Door.” Shaikh surveys Web designers on the look and readability of established fonts and the ones they’re creating. Her team is also building an online tool that will help people choose the best Google font for their Web pages. A balanced soul: Life as a “Googler” has few dull moments. When Shaikh isn’t traveling to New York, London, Dublin or Munich for conferences or research, she’s in Kirkland enjoying her office’s climbing wall, foosball tables, on-site catering,
W
hen you’re the lone social scientist in the room at Google, sometimes it’s your job to spoil everyone’s fun. That’s life for human factors psychologist Dawn Shaikh, PhD, who runs research studies for two teams of what she calls “hard-core computer science geniuses” who are creating Google’s new fonts and font-related tools. She’s tasked with keeping her cohorts focused on what people say they want in a font or tool she’s testing — a role that often involves nixing features her engineers want to add for their own merriment, such as an option to sort fonts by designer that her data show no one will use. “The engineers here can literally build anything,” says Shaikh. “Sometimes they want to build something incredible, just because they can. But we don’t always need all the bells and whistles.” Global Google: One of the two teams Shaikh works with is creating fonts for use in less industrialized nations. “In a lot of countries, there aren’t fonts that are appropriate for onscreen reading and we are trying to change that,” says Shaikh, who is based at Google’s Kirkland, Wash., offices. One example is Ethiopic, a 277-character alphabet that supports five languages spoken in and around Ethiopia. Working with translators, Shaikh
10 • gradPSYCH • September 2011
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of gradPSYCH - September 2011
GradPSYCH - September 2011
Contents
Interns: Be sure to track your hours
Students often notice but only sometimes blow the whistle on peers’ ethical violations
Psychology student spearheads coming-out project
Internship application costs rise
Odd Jobs
Media Picks
Chair’s Corner
Research Roundup
Matters to a Degree
The new academic job market
Applier beware
Does TV accurately portray psychology?
Safer travels
How to handle a tough audience
Free Money for Education
Meet your new advocates
Bulletin Board
Jobs, internships, postdocs and other opportunities
The Back Page
gradPSYCH - September 2011
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