Usability professionals: Lost in the shadows

G Sankaranarayanan/ Chennai

Like technical writing, usability as a discipline was in the limelight in the giddy days of the software boom. However, in the post Nasdaq crash era, it seems to get only fleeting attention. People were employed with fancy job titles at Web design and software development firms: usability engineers, interaction designers, user experience managers, human factor engineers....Usability labs were set up to evaluate the user-friendliness of products. The labs were busy identifying, recruiting, subjecting to tests and compenstating the target users. Several techniques like card sorting were reported to have been submitted for patent rights. Usability was touted as something that could make or break e-commerce. That was then.

Low awareness

“Even today, understanding about usability among IT organisations is dangerously poor. The reason is that in India there are just a few properly trained usability professionals, who can champion usability in their organisations and create the right awareness. Therefore, organisations will continue not to benefit from tangible business benefits that high usability can bring to all stakeholders including vendor and buyer/user organisations,” says Pradeep Henry, the founder/head of Cognizant Technology Solutions’ Usability Group, and the author of User-Centered Information Design for Improved Software Usability (Artech House, US).

Agrees Kingsley Jegan, a senior usability professional with a renowned software firm, who runs a blog (http://kingsley.blog-city.com) dedicated to usability since four years, “In the post-dotcom crash scenario, job openings have shrunk considerably. And the understanding of the profession is still pretty low. However, the awareness of the discipline has been increasing. A number of companies I know have considerable difficulty hiring qualified usability professionals. I have personally seen two-three organisations set up usability teams within the last six months and known at least 40-50 people who are employed in

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) related fields—Usability Engineering, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, User Experience, etc. I estimate that there may be 250-300 usability professionals between Chennai and Bangalore.”

Kiruba Shankar, the co-founder of netusability.org who works with India Software Group, Chennai, puts it succintly: “In the post dotcom crash era, usability professionals are considered to be “nice-to-haves” and not “must-haves” in IT organisations. Since they are in the fringe of necessity, they are usually done away with when it comes to rightsizing.” However, he observes that the need for usability is not underestimated. Suman Kumar, a columnist on Usability for several e-magazines and a blogger on usability (www.usablityrules.blogspot.com) gives a different picture: “Before or after the dotcom crash, it never made any difference because almost no IT product company paid any attention to usability. Job demand is like ever before: stagnant.”

Formal training

Even if the organisations realise the contributions of usability experts to their bottomline, they have a tough time in finding the right skill and are increasingly wary of the quality of usability professionals’ contributions to product development. One of the important reasons is that there are no specialised courses offered by the formal educational sector.

Henry says, “I would not call graphic designers, technical writers, or Web designers as usability professionals. Given the current non-availability of rofessional training in usability engineering in India, I would expect a real usability professional to have done some educational course in usability or human-computer interaction in a Western university. Or they should have been trained by a mentor, who has such education.”

According to him, in the present setup, one can hope to find potential usability professionals in people with engineering/science degrees in computer science, HCI/usability, technical communication, architecture, industrial design, and international business. Organisations, nevertheless, have to train them all in usability engineering. “Three out of 10 in my group have an MS from a US university. Back in 1994-95, I took a usability engineering course myself at the University of California-Berkeley (Extension).”

Henry observes that though Human Factors Engineering is a well-established discipline in the US and in some other Western countries, there is no significant course being taught in India probably because of poor awareness and lack of well-trained trainers on the topic. According to Jegan, IIT Mumbai and IIT Guwahati are some of the best places to hunt for usability professionals. He says, “Though there are hardly any formal qualifications to aspire for, the IITs are starting to do good work in this area. IIT Mumbai and IIT Guwahati have Master of Design and Bachelor of Design programmes respectively with a specialisation in visual communications. A certification programme is offered by Human Factors International (HFI), Mumbai.”

He adds that unlike in the past, since the pool of potential employees has become larger, organisations are now looking for formal qualifications in one of these fields: psychology, industrial design and visual communication. Unfortunately, the programmes of such disciplines do not adequately deal with subjects close to usability such as cognitive science or experimental psychology or Human Computer Interface (HCI). He says: “I’d look for strong user-focus (read: listening, interviewing/surveying skills) and a solid knowledge of user interfaces, standards. Most important quality though is the ability to relate seemingly unrelated things. You have to be creative to be a usability pro.”

Team acceptance

It needs no survey to find out that the services of the usability professionals within the product development team is not accepted that easily. In a practical scenario, since usability professionals do not normally have programming or even hardcore designing background, they naturally face communication challenges within the development team that mostly comprises “techies”. Henry accepts that there is always potential for inter-personal communication conflicts. He believes that the conflicts could be minimised or reduced if the usability professional has credentials in usability engineering and is a good negotiator.

Jegan gives the following reasons for conflict of interests: 1) Most usability professionals lack credibility in the eyes of their peers because they lack professional qualifications. 2) In India most of them are low on evaluating their own work, providing metrics or demonstrating the superiority of their design in an objective manner. 3) Usability groups in the country do not have a clear, enforceable mandate over the user interface which leads to political fist fights. The usability group should be able to defend it’s design decisions when challenged in an objective manner. This will garner respect, a mandate and eventually, a budget.

Jegan adds that often the client and the development team can get into deep dispute over how a user interface should be designed. Since both parties talk from personal anecdotal experience, these “discussions” are usually endless. A usability professional can solve a situation like this by taking a stand, explaining the reasons for doing so, and justifying how the solution is better for the end-user. Kumar agrees that the trick is to work ‘with’ them instead of going solo: “I always make it a point to invite a programmer for my usability tests so that he/she knows what exactly we are trying to achieve. But ‘yes’ programmers tend to behave like artists, defending their work, instead of taking a broad perspective; I wouldn’t blame them...senior architects and managers have no clue what usability is...we have to educate them.”

Remunerations also vary from one organisation to another. Jegan says, “It mainly comes down to how the management perceives the value added by the usability professionals. The perceived value is much higher in product companies and lower in service organisations. As a rule of thumb, the more removed an organisation is from the end-user, the lesser the perceived value. This is due to the simple reason that if you don’t retail your own products, then your customer is not the same person as the end-user. So the organisation is geared only to satisfy the customers’ goals, rather than the end-users’. As the levels of separation increase, the end-user is progressively ignored.”

Clients on usability

Another fundamental question raised frequently is about the level of importance the clients place on the usability design. If they cannot really distinguish between good and bad usability and if usability is not proved to be a chief differentiator, a USP in the market, then organisations have less or no incentive to bother about this area.

“I think from a client’s point of view, the very presence of a dedicated usability team instills in him a sense of confidence on the company. But if the usability services comes with its own high price tag, I’ve seen many clients uncheck this option in their requirements,” says Shankar.

Kumar points out that to a great extent clients insist on usability. “Look at the TV commercials of software products in USA and a few in India... usability will be the ONLY differentiator as product-differentiation between competing products starts diminishing.”

Agrees Jegan, “Clients in the US are a lot more aware of human factors and usability. Understandably, if a client is developing an application for internal use, they are a lot less concerned about usability than if they where going to market it as a product.”

Future scope

Though the job market has started to expand slowly and people are trying again to cash in on the demand for skilled usability professionals, many have differing opinions on the long-term growth prospect of this field, which is at its nascent stage in India. Besides, usability is said to be a narrow field that offers no scope for switching over to other IT domains.

“But the trained real usability engineers are passionate about what they do and are unlikely to think about switching,” says Henry, adding “Usability engineering is about creating a part of the deliverable, that is, the user interface. The user interface is a significant part of a software application (user interface code can be over 40 percent of the total software code). There are so many techniques and methods to apply, and there is so much more to learn all the time. I conducted my first usability test back in 1989; now leading a 10-member team, I’m still learning new things. Besides creating high user performance interfaces for our clients, my team is professionally very active: inventing, publishing, presenting at conferences, even conducting our own conferences, and leading India’s active usability society. There is so much to do in this field!”

However, Henry is sceptical of the standard of usability field in India in future. He observes: “There may be growing opportunities in India, with overseas clients demanding usability from Indian vendors. But the concern is: what kind of people are going to do usability engineering? Yesterday, people with an MA in English were labelled “Technical Writers”, and we see very few good technical writers. Something similar is happening today to usability in India. Web or graphic designers are re-labelled as “Usability Experts”. That’s because organisations incorrectly think that user interface design or usability is about creating pretty screens. There is also this myth that usability is subjective and that it can be done by anyone. Combining dangerous myths like these and the non-availability of trained usability engineers, we should unfortunately expect a lot of mediocrity in this field in India. I hope things will improve with the increasing return of Indians, who’ve received their degrees in the HCI and related areas from Western universities.”

The main question that usability professionals should be thinking about, but are probably not, is how to move up. One of the best upward routes is into product management.