More often than not Disaster Exercises fail due to poorly defined objectives or poorly considered logistics.

What is a Disaster Exercise? What defines its success or failure? What is a typical objective and what defines a good one?

What does any of this have to do with usability testing?

These questions and many more will be raised (and if we're lucky, addressed) during the evening's discussion.

Plan AHEAD. All Hazard Exercise Administration and Development was specifically designed to improve the quality and efficiency of creating exercises for Emergency Management and Disaster Preparedness.

Mr. Frishberg illustrates how customer focused design and usability testing were integrated into Cliffside Software's design process to create an automation tool for usability test design.

For over 30 years, Mr. Frishberg has been working with computing technologies, starting by assembling his first analog computer in 1967 and continuing as an Algol 80 and Basic programmer before the onset of microprocessors. In 1979 Mr. Frishberg graduated from U.C. Santa Cruz with his degree in Environmental Planning emphasizing Information Technologies. In 1984, with his California state license to practice Architecture, Mr. Frishberg also began his career as an Information Architect (before he knew that's what it was called).

A strong proponent of "design elegance", Mr. Frishberg has been involved with a variety of information architecture projects including a paper based graphical project scheduling system (during the pre-PC period), the design and implementation of a symbol language to streamline CAD based facilities and asset management , and the development of Plan AHEAD - a usability test development tool. Throughout his carreer as general partner of Phase II, a CAD based facilities management consultancy, and with Cliffside Software, Inc., a Portland software development firm, Mr. Frishberg has maintained a strong customer centered design philosophy.

A California refugee since 1992, Mr. Frishberg, his wife, two children and two cats feel extraordinarily lucky to live and work in Portland.