SIGIA-L Mail Archives: RE: SIGIA-L: Who is the Usability Specia
RE: SIGIA-L: Who is the Usability Specialist?
From: Cindy Alvarez (calvarez_at_teamsphere.com)
Date: Wed Apr 18 2001 - 18:16:00 EDT
>In most cases, the IA acts as the Usability Specialist and can lead the
>entire team, even the accounts people, who tend not to stay involved
>within the small pieces of development and along with the end user,
>become great Usability Specialist. True?
We-ell... certainly a small team has to utilize everyone they can. But as
Jess said,
"the usability person is there to validate (or
not) the design through empirical measures (expert review and usability
testing)" -- and the other team members are not necessarily able/willing to
use empirical measures and testing in order to take on the role of
usability specialist.
What I mean is, if I happen to choose an ugly color, everyone in the office
will express their distaste.
But if I structure a web-based task poorly, our marketing guy isn't going
to say "Hey, I noticed that it takes 3 clicks to do this simple task. Why
can't we cut that down?"
The designers and engineers both check each others' implementations ... but
still, by far the best person to evaluate usability and functionality is
our QA analyst, because she didn't *create* any of it.
Cindy Alvarez
Senior Web/UI Designer
TeamSphere Interactive
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