ExpertDabbler

Someone as recently as last week asked me what I do for a living.
When I say ‘designer’, the image that immediately comes to their mind is cool 2D flash animations and 3D animations, special effects etc. And when I venture to explain them, all I get is a vague “oh, ok” and some wild guesses which clearly betray their lack of understanding about what I said. Mind you I am not talking about laymen, I have faced the same blank faces even among my techie co-workers.

So how do I earn all the money required for those idiappams in Pichu pillai street?
I am an interaction designer. I am concerned about how the user interacts with the software application my employer develops. In another words i’m a user experience professional. But since I am not formally trained Product Designer, I restrict myself to designing user friendly web based software applications(the likes of Yahoo mails, ecommerce portals, shaadi.com, IRCTC etc):)

Usability can very well be extended to everyday things and objects.
Donald Norman has written a phenomenal book on this subject.

So what’s usability? It’s about how usable or user friendly a product is.
How easy is the interaction to remember, to learn, to prevents errors to the maximum extent etc. It draws from disciplines as diverse as cognitive psychology, human machine interaction, aesthetics, ergonomics etc. So it’s a one big time kalavai. Just like me
All leading software companies like Google, Microsoft and gaming companies invest millions of dollars in research into Usability and Human computer Interaction. People like Jackob Neilsen, Steve Krugg, Scott Berkun are considered usability celebrities.

Infosys, Cognizant and HCL have full fledged usability labs and practices. IBM is offering usability as a service offering.

Usability can be explained more clearly with examples where its lacking. Let me try with a fairly common place machine.

I guess most of us are familiar with ATMs. Typically, each bank follows its own standards and methods for ATM interaction. Even within banks the ATMs installed are of different variety. Some spit the card out even when as we proceed with the transaction. Some ATMs treat card removal as the equivalent of logging out of a system.

The card holder is sometimes to the right of the monitor, sometimes its at the top-right corner. Some ATMs insist the user to enter the password right away. Some would allow you inside and then ask for 4 digit PIN password. Some would have an enter button, some do not.

So for the same process the lay user has to learn 5 different ways of accessing my account in ATMs of 5 different banks. This is one classical example of misplaced creativity or bad usability in my opinion. The reason for this is the lack of standards in designing ATM user interfaces here. As a result, each design and implement the way they think is best. The worse part is, most of the times the user tend to blame themselves for the trouble in using the devices or machines.

For more real world usability issues in real world objects, check out Bad Designs website

Why did I write about this?

I keep hearing the demand for qualified usability experts far outstrip the supply. But unfortunately not many are aware of the opportunities in this field.
They simply follow the “I want to be a programmer” clan.
If you love programming, by god please do that.
All I wanted to say is that a satisfying career in software is wider than writing code. That is the reason why people like me with no formal training are kuppai kottufying.

Where can one learn about user interface design? The best places to learn this formally in India is NID Ahmedabad and IDC, IIT Mumbai. For learning-by-doing pros like me Human factors is running a basic level course.

I hope this information is useful to fresh graduates who are facing that million dollar question “What next?”

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 20th, 2005 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.