John Vaughanalready embraces a broad umbrella of activity: graphics, navigation & structure, behavior, online help and personalization. Within all that, there are also two major approaches to usability.
The Usability Engineer
The Usability Engineer is more likely to identify customer needs, data and behavior that have somehow been missed. |
The Interaction Designer
The Interaction Designer delivers immediate solutions. Many development teams look to them as a "short cut" to market. |
With appropriate backgound information the Interaction Designer can look at a site and come up with a fair number of viable design improvements quickly. Often that's all the client wants.
But there are also strong arguments for Usability Analysis. We now expect our sites to handle a more intimate relationship with the customer. We have the tools to harvest the customer behavior, organize the business information and deliver personalization.
The Usability Engineer should be able to identify things you've missed.
But you'll probably still need an Interaction Designer to come up with creative solutions.
Most production environments lump the two schools of effort together, even though they are actually very different. You rarely see this sort of rigorous separation of responsibilities. The "usability expert" is often expected to wear both hats, providing neutral analysis and creative advocacy. Sometimes that can get a little confusing.
