My main interest is in how people glean or create meanings from contextual clues and patterns. Such cognitive parsing usually calls upon implicit and embedded as well as explicit information; it happens when people know how to act in a social situation, perform a task, or converse in a natural language. I ask questions like: How do people go about navigating a piece of writing, or a computer interface? How do they carry out a large goal by performing a series of more specific actions?

Working in the field of website and software design, I research people's goals, strategies, behaviors, and mental models to design user interfaces for websites or web applications. Then I work with the rest of a team to ensure that the finished product (and its documentation and training) continues to match the original vision and the users' needs.

I also do translations into English from German and French.

If you are looking for my academic work, please go to http://www.emerysnyder.org. Thank you!