Skills needed by user-centered design practitioners in real software development environments

Abstract

User-centered design (UCD) of human-computer interfaces--including task flow and documentation---is gaining acceptance in software development organizations. But managers who want their organizations to start using UCD often do not know what characteristics to look for, in candidates for hiring or retraining to fill UCD roles; this article can help. It has the recommendations from participants in a CHI '92 conference workshop on this topic. The 16 workshop participants were UCD practitioners and managers from companies and a few universities across the United States, Canada, and Sweden. This article first describes some typical roles of UCD practitioners in software development organizations. There follows a list of attributes that UCD practitioners should have. Some attributes should be had by all practitioners, regardless of their subspecialties. The most important of those universal attributes are of three types: knowledge that can be acquired formally (e.g., of the human-computer interaction literature, cognitive processes, experimental design, rapid prototyping), skill that can be gotten from experience (e.g., estimating resources needed to do a job, commitment to users, understanding of the software development process, negotiating ability, enjoyment of working on teams, ability to really listen), and attributes that are harder to acquire (e.g., tenacity, flexibility). Every practitioner needs other characteristics as well, but their importances differ by the practitioners' subspecialties (e.g., a design team leader needs team management skills).