Professional Development
Usability practitioners are sometimes trained as industrial engineers, psychologists, kinesiologists, systems design engineers, or with a degree in information architecture, information or library science, or Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). More often though they are people who are trained in specific applied fields who have taken on a usability focus within their organization. Anyone who aims to make tools easier to use and more effective for their desired function within the context of work or everyday living can benefit from studying usability principles and guidelines.
For those seeking to extend their training, the Usability Professionals' Association offers online resources, reference lists, courses, conferences, and local chapter meetings. The UPA also sponsors World Usability Day each November.
Related professional organizations include the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) and the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest groups in Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), and Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH).
The Society for Technical Communication also has a special interest group on Usability and User Experience (UUX). They publish a quarterly newsletter called Usability Interface.
Read more about this topic: Usability
Famous quotes containing the words professional and/or development:
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)
“Ultimately, it is the receiving of the child and hearing what he or she has to say that develops the child’s mind and personhood.... Parents who enter into a dialogue with their children, who draw out and respect their opinions, are more likely to have children whose intellectual and ethical development proceeds rapidly and surely.”
—Mary Field Belenky (20th century)