Related Fields
How does usability relate to other professions?
Most usability practitioners work in product development, such as software products, consumer electronics, or in the creation of devices incorporating both hardware and software components. Their chief concern is the usability of that product. The goal of their work is to contribute to the design of a system that provides optimal human performance and ensures the best possible user experience.
Usability professionals do not work in isolation – rather, they collaborate with people from many backgrounds. Usability complements and overlaps with many related professional activities including:
- Human factors/ergonomics, which applies scientific information concerning humans to the design of objects, systems and environments for human use. It includes designing for human physiology and optimizing performance in large corporate and military systems.
- Experience design, which takes account of people and organizations in ways useful for business and design, and conceives, envisions, and informs what products, services, and communications to make.
- Information architecture, which focuses on organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability.
- Interaction design, which defines the structure and behaviors of interactive products and services and user interactions with those products and services.
- Information design, which specializes in the organization and presentation of textual and visual information.
- Industrial design, which focuses on physical solutions to user and manufacturer needs.
- Graphic design, which focuses on clarity of pictorial representations and overall visual appearance.
Many usability practitioners incorporate aspects of these specialisms in their jobs. (For a more complete list, see the list of related professional organizations.) All these professions share the objective of contributing to the design of systems that work better for the people who experience them.
