Best Careers 2009: Usability Experience Specialist

Job titles don't matter - results do

I agree with many points here...

My job title is "Key Expert for Ergonomics". My responsibility is to drive Ergonomic Design within the company and help the product development teams to integrate usability and ergonomics into their products.

I have a background in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering with a PhD in Ergonomics. Later I also added an MBA to that, but mainly to convince the marketing guys that I know what they are talking about...

Btw, my engineering background is great since I often have to argue with engineers/developers.

The tricky part in my job is to find a good balance between business, technology and usability issues. I call that the "Ergonomic triangle", where we must find a compromise between business/COGS, technical requirements and usability/ergonomics.

From my point of view design should not be the fourth force, but rather a good "formal" designer should integrate all points.

Unfortunately too many designers fail at this point, as more often than not they miss both, the technical background and the usability know-how.

(I am quite fortunate to have a design manager in my company who understands and promotes this view of design)

So, yes, I agree, our profession is desperately needed. We all have to use products day-in day-out (from hand tools to washing mashines to cars to remote controls to mobile phones to computers) that are anything but user-friendly. The biggest problems I see are

1) Often enough users got used (sic!) to poor usability, so technical guys do not see the need for better usability.

2) Everybody understands that a cordless screw driver or a hammer drill or a circular saw cannot be sold without a functioning electrical motor, but it is no problem to sell these tools with a poor HMI...

There is only one solution to this issue:

1) connect with the developers, then

2) cooperate with them to solve their problems (and not just tell them what they should do...), and then

3) convince them (by providing great solutions).

In my experience, if you help them to improve their product once, they will come back to you with their next project.

And this is the key point:

If you do it right, people in your company will not think "Maybe we should call the usability/ergonomics/interface/HF/... people" but they will simply think: "Dr. Joe must be part of the project team"

Job titles don't matter, results do.

Joe Vedder @ May 11, 2009 02:45:35 AM