[Sigia-l] "Usability Professionals Must Disappear"

[Patrick Neeman]

> "era of specialization"? I think implicitly this is what's 
> being called into question. Do we (or our clients or users) 
> need to waste a single joule of our energy worrying about 
> internecine wars among interaction designers, interaction 
> architects, user experience designers, usability engineers, 
> and the whole lot? Is the task so vast and compartmentable 
> that we need all these minutely carved fiefdoms? How is this 
> helping anyone?
>  
> > Mark and many others are correct when the say stop the 
> whining and get 
> > on with it. This "what do we call ourselves" nonsense has 
> to end and 
> > Tog's Interaction Architect is no solution.


Just my two cents -- A few issues that may be hindering adoption of titles
and such:

- At most companies, projects aren't big enough to employ full-time IA/UI
folks.

At my last full-time gig, I was a Product Manager, before that a Program
Manager. UI design was just one of the many tasks I did on a daily basis.
There was also marketing, writing of help text, taking care of business
issues, dealing with pricing, et al. That isn't saying UI stuff isn't
important or it should be trivalized, but for most job openings, UI
expertise is exactly >ONE< of many requirements many jobs have in the
software field. And at my last job, if all I did was focus on IA and not do
stuff like manage product development, I would have been out of a job.

It's great that some of the people on the list have found a place at a
company that can afford a full time IA Staff.

- Most clients don't necessarily care about what the titles are, but they
just want the job done.

Clients are a clueless sort in software/web development because they aren't
experts in it. All they know is how their business works, and that they have
issues with their current website/web application or want to build a new
one, and the very first thing they think about is that they need to hire a
bunch of programmers. Designers come second (usually web designers, no UI
designers), maybe QA people third. IA's are pretty far down the list because
1) a lot of people don't know what it is, and 2) most applications or
websites don't need a full time UI/IA person. Many, many project management
books regarding the web, when mentioning IA, say it's usually a task that is
given out to the project manager.

- If programmers were trained in in UI design, we might all be out of a job.

Most programmers avoid UI design like the plague, which is weird, because
the most visible part of their work >IS< the UI design. The most elegance
architecture under the hood isn't going to matter if no one can use it. But
this kind of work is seldom taught in college to programmers, and they pay
even less attention to it in the real world. If they spent any time on this
area UI/IA folks as a specialty would be in trouble.

- Truth be told, we should be disappearing into the woodwork.

UI people are much like System Admins -- you really should only see them
when things go wrong. If the site and/or application is working well, then
the company is receiving return. If they aren't receiving return on
investment, then the UI folks have to come out. Most UI projects do best
when making incremental enhancements, not by sticking themselves in the
middle of process.

---

Maybe just because I've been watching this list for a while (in the
background), or involved in the web arena for while, but I find it curious
that the only group of people, other than a few digirati consistently
grabbing headlines, making waves are UI-types, which is pretty interesting
considering the soul searching going on within the community. Maybe one of
the reasons for this soul searching is a percieved self importance.

P@

Patrick Neeman
Nexis Interactive
 
949 643-0910 land
949 633-3054 cell