Usability professionals—current practices and future development

Abstract

The usability concept has now received such a wide recognition in information technology (IT) development that working with usability can be regarded as a profession in its own right. In recent research projects, we have surveyed and studied usability work on an individual level in a number of Swedish development organisations, including success factors and obstacles. What we have seen relates to the individual usability professional and her background and experiences, the organisation in which she operates, the development process, communication and communication means, and finally the attitudes and basic values held by the people involved.In this paper, we compile and reflect on selected findings from different studies on usability work in practical systems 1 development in a number of Swedish organisations. We discuss our findings from a practical point of view and relate them to the research of others within the international HCI community. Finally, we discuss some issues we consider important for the future development of the practice of usability that we believe is of interest to the international community of usability professionals. q (J. Gulliksen).1 In this paper, we use the term 'system' or 'IT system' to denote the kind of products and/or applications developed in the organisations that we have studied. We consider 'software' too limited a concept, being only a part of the IT system. Our use of 'system' does not include humans or other technology, although they may seen as part of an overall system.

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

“…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.…”

“…On one hand, the HCI literature has touched upon the issue in the sense that it maintains that usability specialists have to act as usability champions and evangelists inside their organizations and try to seduce and convince numerous stakeholder groups, i.e. developers, managers, sales, marketing and documentation, to buy into usability [2,8,13,15,16,25,37]. On the other hand, the literature on multiparty IT development efforts reveals that there nowadays are parties from numerous organizations and even countries involved, representing different kinds of areas of expertise: not only technology, marketing and business, but also strategy, manufacturing, education, curation, meteorology etc.…”

“…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]. Finally, also a facilitator role has been identified in the HCI literature [4,7,13,16,17,30]. Either it is emphasized that usability specialists should orchestrate design session and facilitate collaboration among developers and users [4,7,13,16,17,30] or usability specialists are positioned as evangelists that should advocate usability inside their organization even more broadly, targeting the management, sales, marketing and documentation [2,8,13,15,16,17,30,25,37].…”

“…This study examines the work of human computer interaction specialists (HCI), whose work practice has been studied under the varying labels such as usability professional [7,13], usability specialist [4,6], usability practitioner [25] and HCI practitioner [12,15]. 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.…”

“…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.…”