The lonesome cowboy: A study of the usability designer role in systems development

Abstract

This paper reports on an evaluation of the usability designer role as applied in two Swedish systems development organisations. The role was initially defined by us, but evolved in these two organisations. We conducted interviews with usability designers, project managers and a user representative. Our main research question was whether or not the introduction of a usability designer has been successful in terms of changes in the systems development process and the impact the role has had on products, projects and organisations. To some extent, the role has met our expectations and intentions for instance, in helping the usability designers shift their focus towards design, and assume some kind of "users' advocate" role. But in other ways, the role "failed". The usability designers in our study are still facing the kind of problems and obstacles that usability professionals have always had to deal with. q

Usability in product development practice; an exploratory case study comparing four markets

“…In these cases data collection methods are usually questionnaires (Rauch and Wilson, 1995;Vredenburg et al, 2002b;Venturi and Troost, 2004;Ji and Yun, 2006), interviews (Bekker, 1995;Borgholm and Madsen, 1999;Boivie et al, 2003;Boivie et al, 2006;Bruno and Dick, 2007), or a combination of both (Rosenbaum et al, 2000;Gulliksen et al, 2006;Neumann et al, 2009). Informants are mostly usability specialists and interaction designers, and the focus is usually not so much on the product development process and team as a whole, but on usability-related activities and usability departments.…”

Usability Specialists as Boundary Spanners – An Appraisal of Usability Specialists’ Work in Multiparty Distributed Open Source Software Development Effort

“…The data showed that the informative, consultative, participative and designer roles were all adopted by the usability specialists in the case project [in line with e.g. 3,13,15,16]. The usability specialists were providing information about users based on their empirical work with children and on their general state-of-the-art HCI knowledge, as well as offering both empirical user feedback and feedback based on their expert evaluations [see 15].…”

“…Gulliksen and his research group have reported numerous studies, mostly concerning public authorities in Sweden [e.g. 3,12,13], while Iivari has analyzed usability specialists work practices in product development in Finland [15,16]. These are qualitative inquiries on the matter, but there is also some survey research carried out [6,12,37] 26,27], reporting on usability specialists' ways of working when face-to-face contact is impossible.…”

“…In this situation usability specialists indeed can contribute, but it is a challenge to involve a usability specialist in every relevant design situation [15]. Moreover, in the designer role, usability specialists are given the authority to make the important design decisions concerning the product quality based on their expertise [3,8,15,16]. However, this may actually remove the job role of the usability specialist altogether that has also proven out to be problematic as in the situation in which every designer should be also an expert in usability; usability may end up in being taken care of by nobody [15].…”

“…Here, these experts will be called usability specialists [in line with 3,13], as this is a widely known and accepted job role in industry and there already is an association for usability professionals. This choice naturally makes usability as the main goal of their work, even though they may place their emphasis also or actually even more on usefulness or high quality user experience.…”