Best Careers 2009: Usability Experience Specialist

Overview. This profession has a hard time agreeing on a name for itself. It's called, for example, user experience specialist, interface designer, information architect, usability practitioner, user-centered design specialist, and usability manager.

Whatever you call them, their job is to help ensure that products, especially technical ones, are easy and pleasurable to use. How? First, they observe and interview potential users to identify their needs and preferences. They may conduct a task analysis to break down the user experience of a product to its component parts and make suggestions for each. After a prototype is developed, they may watch and interview potential users again and suggest revisions. Usability specialists may work, for example, on voting machines, the next generation iPhone, a medical imaging machine, an athletic shoe production line, a shopping website, or a bricks-and-mortar store.

A potential downside of this career is that shortsighted companies believe they can make products without a specifically trained usability expert, so you may have to spend considerable time justifying your service's value. Another drawback is that you may need to make efforts to avoid being typecast as someone who can help design only one kind of product.

Those concerns are usually dwarfed by the ongoing creativity and the good feeling of continually creating products that are a pleasure to use.

A Day in the Life. Because you're the only usability specialist in your company, you're involved in all stages of the product development process. You might actually never get to participate in all aspects in one day, but here, we'll suspend that bit of reality so you can get a better idea of what the career is like.

You work for a medical device manufacturer that wants to develop a next-generation surgery tool called a laparoscopic laser. You attend a meeting with the CEO and representatives from marketing and finance, who are all debating the product's rough parameters. While you make suggestions and raise questions, for the most part, you're a listener. You leave the room with a list of musts, maybes, and questions about the prospective product.

Next, you read up on the current generation of laparoscopic lasers and then observe three surgeons who are using them. You ask questions and take notes about what they like and dislike about it, and how they suggest it should be improved.

You write a report summarizing what you've learned. Then, engineers develop a prototype of the product that comes closest to meeting both the company's and the surgeons' desires.

You recruit and observe surgeons to use the prototype, again asking questions. You make recommendations for changes in the laser. The final product ends up incorporating only some of what you had hoped for, but you still feel a sense of pride for having helped ensure that the new laser will be more effective and pleasurable to use.

Salary Data

Median (with eight years in the field): $96,200

25th to 75th percentile range (with eight or more years of experience): $82,900-$120,000

(Data provided by PayScale.com.)

Training

People can enter this field with a wide range of backgrounds. They may have bachelor's or master's degrees in fields such as human factor psychology, human-computer interaction, computer science, technical communication cognitive psychology, anthropology, or business. They may have practical experience in customer service, quality assurance, marketing, and product development.

A master's degree in usability can enhance your ability to get hired, but more important may be the ability to think rigorously and have relentless curiosity about how to make products more user friendly.

Key to getting hired is practical experience. Often, you can get your first projects by networking at major industry conferences and tutorials, for example:

Usability Professionals' Association 2009 conference: June 8-12, 2008, in Portland, Ore.

Computer-Human-Interaction 2009 conference: April 4-9, 2009, in Boston.