About the Usability and User Experience Community
Portrait of the Community

Who Are Usability SIG Members

By Candace Cole
Usability Interface, February 97

Who joins the Usability SIG? Thanks to respondents of our Fall survey, we now have a much better idea of who you are and why you joined. We had 74 responses, which is a 15% response rate.

Most of you (62%) have more than six years experience in Technical Communications, and the more experienced you are in the field, the more likely you are to have some experience in usability design and test. As a group, though, only a quarter of you have extensive usability design experience, and about 15% percent of you have extensive usability test experience. Roughly a quarter of you have no experience at all in usability design or test.

Only nine of you (13%) teach. One-fifth of you are managers. Managers seem significantly more likely to be involved in usability design and testing than non-managers: more that half the managers reported usability involvement, while only a fifth of those not teaching or managing are involved in usability.

Regardless of your job responsibilities, most of you learned about usability from a variety of sources, relying heavily on books and articles (32%), on-the-job training (19%), and formal (19%) and informal (17%) seminars. Most of you took advantage of multiple learning modes, including mentors and interacting with colleagues. Only two of you mentioned learning about usability in graduate school.

The main reasons you joined the Usability SIG were to keep current with usability in general and to learn about usability in general. You are most interested in improving the usability of online help, product documentation, and Web-based information, although other topics follow closely in popularity, with the exception of marketing materials. Usability design interests you the most (26%) of the topics we asked about.