[IxDA Discuss] "Human Factors" angle on our field

[Barbara Ballard]

On 5/11/07, Billie Mandel <Billie.Mandel at openwave.com> wrote:
> So what about those Human Factors folk?  The ones who have a Human
> Factors degree or professional membership, and who AREN'T also
> participating in the IxD or IA-centered organizations.  My observation
> del giorno: they seem to speak a different language, even when they're
> talking about the same core set of tasks (i.e. creating/evaluating
> software/web sites to make sure they are efficient, easy, or fun for
> people to use).
>
>
>
> Has anyone else noticed this?  How have you handled the "translation,"
> when you need to communicate with or assess someone who lives in that
> universe?  Have you hired any folks like this to do design, or worked on
> a team with them - and has it been a success?  Any "bilingual" HF/IxD
> people able to help me out here?

I have training in HF, but I got a minor in industrial design.  And
there was an interesting schism between the two.

In my experience, HF folks will be good at usability testing and
similar activities. They are also grounded in human performance from
an academic perspective and will have a much better chance at
predicting user behavior than an equivalently experienced designer, at
least until they have some number of years of experience.

HF folks come in a number of flavors: CHI-focused,
engineering-focused, psychology-focused.  The last tends to be focused
on research, the others tend to be a mix of research and "design"
oriented.  That's "design" as in "figure out a good way to solve this
problem"; I've not seen a single class in ideation in engineering
school.

FYI, a number of the more senior Sprint UX folks are HF trained.  As
time went on, the UX team specialized, with a research group (largely
with market research training and similar), a "design" group (with
visual and interaction design training), and a set of "generalists",
typically with HF training, who ended up owning the UX for the
products under their responsibility.  They've reorganized, and of
course this is an over-generalization, but it gets you an idea.



-- 
Barbara Ballard
barbara at littlespringsdesign.com 1-785-838-3003