Who am I? From interface designers to usability architects

HCI professionals are known as interaction designers, usability experts, graphic designers, user-experience experts, etc. (Belenguer et al. 2003).

With a greatly diversified range of interactive products and the growing need to „get the UI right‟, a variety of job descriptions has emerged (Preece et al. 2002):

• Interaction designers - people involved in the design of all the interactive aspects of a product
• Usability engineers - people who focus on evaluating products, using usability methods and principles
• Information architects - people who come up with ideas of how to plan and structure interactive products
• User-experience designers - people who do all the above but who may also carry out field studies to influence the design of products
  

Although UE is a well-established and broadly used term, (Preece et al. 2002) state that the discipline of interaction design is the umbrella term covering all of these aspects that are fundamental to all disciplines, fields, and approaches con-cerned with researching and designing computer-based systems for people.

Because the world of existing terms is not enough, I recently decided to add a nomenclature: the usability architect. I chose this term because it is the counterpart of the software architect - one who can analyse requirements, conceptualize models and designs and actually build the interactive software system with a focus on the user interface and usability.

References:
Belenguer, J., Parra, J., Torres, I. and Molina, P. J. (2003), 'HCI Designers and Engineers: Is it possible to work to-gether?', in In IFIP Working Group 2.7/13.4, INTERACT 2003 Workshop on Bridging the Gap Between Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction.

Preece, J., Rogers, Y. and Sharp, H. (2002), Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, John Wiley & Sons.