High demand for user-friendly goods

By VIKKI BLAND

Fancy a career as an interaction designer? How about as a usability consultant?

If you've never heard of either, you're not unusual. Despite being well established in countries such as Australia, Britain and the United States, the usability services industry is in its infancy in New Zealand.

Briefly, a usability consultant (or interaction designer) advises companies on how to make their products easier to use.

Internationally, the IT industry has traditionally employed usability consultants to help meet customer demands for manuals, software, websites and electronic devices that are easier to use. (Fancy testing the usability of the latest PC game?)

Beverley Stevens, director of usability consulting service DesignIT, says unlike businesses in other countries, New Zealand companies have traditionally let software developers and web designers determine how an IT application or website will look and how users will interact with it.

"Developers always say their software or website is user friendly, but often it's not. They run into trouble when the product's mental model doesn't match the end-user's mental model." Stevens says usability consultants research and profile end-users and what they want in a product, then develop visual and written concepts of how a product, or parts of a product, should look and be used by those people.

Trent Mankelow, director of Wellington-based usability firm Optimal Usability, agrees New Zealand is behind the rest of the world when it comes to employing usability services, but that there's a need for them.

"For example, approximately 10 per cent of all males are colour blind. We recommended to one of our clients that they increase the contrast between foreground and background colours on their website so colour-blind people could pick up navigational elements more easily."

Mankelow says the demand for usability expertise is picking up, and large companies and developers such as Telecom, Synergy, Peace Software and Navman already employ their own consultants.

"It's a massive field and the possibilities go far beyond websites and software. Think of improving the usability of VCR controls, manual pages or bank deposit forms."

Stevens says the usability market will continue to emerge in New Zealand.

"I saw two jobs advertised last week. One was for a principal usability consultant and the other was a four-week contract for a user interface designer."

So what can a usability consultant earn? Mankelow says experienced US and Australian consultants earn around $100,000 and New Zealanders with the right skills could probably expect salaries of $60,000 to $80,000.

If you're interested in collecting on those salaries, the good news is you don't have to be an IT genius - creativity and an empathy with the end-user are considered the most important skills.

Mankelow says human computer interaction (HCI) skills are perhaps most valuable for IT usability projects.

"Most full computer science courses include some HCI training," he says. "That, together with any kind of psychology study and some management skill, is ideal."

Stevens agrees user empathy is important for usability candidates.

"Usability consultants need to have quite a passion about wanting things to be well designed and easy to use," she says.

"There's also an element of creativity that can't be taught. You need to be able to take intuitive leaps from research on users to how a system or site will work and look."

If you have that creativity, how can you become a usability consultant?

Blake Lough, usability researcher and consultant with the Auckland University of Technology, says the field of usability (which AUT has renamed user experience) is drawing interest from business, IT, communications and arts graduates.

"In the past six to eight months we have started to hear from more and more user- experience consultants in the market. And companies are beginning to understand this can be used to get products right the first time."

He says AUT recently restructured a user-experience laboratory at its Penrose, Auckland Tech Park site. The lab is used for usability research and commercial consulting, and proves the academic world is taking usability as seriously as those who have bet their businesses on it.

Usability consultants

* Research the needs and aptitudes of the typical end-users of a product.

* The product can be anything from a software program or website to a form of remote control

* Work closely with developers and designers and contribute user experience feedback

* Design and develop help manuals

* Provide written descriptions of the interaction between the user and the product