Bay Area Positions Available

What job do you want?
 
Usabililty begins with U
Direct hire or Contract Usability Professionals

Do you need professional usability help on a software project or contract? Would you like to hire additional staff members to enhance your user centered design or development team? Or would you like to outsource an entire usability design or testing project?

At Software Human Factors, we work with you to help you create a product that has your end users in mind. Our staff can provide a wide range of services, including heuristic evaluations, formal usability testing, focus groups, information architecture and nomenclature consultation, plus Interface Design and Development.

Software Human Factors is a professional usability recruiting and consulting agency that provides these services and more. Our team of Information Architects, Usability Experts and other Usability Engineers can help you in any and all phases of your development project.

 
Usability Salaries

How much should usability professionals earn?

 

According to Salary.com a Bay area Interface designer gets on average $98,000 plus benefits and bonus. An Interface Design Director in San Francisco earns on average a base pay of  $168,000.

A salary survey published by Usability Professionals Association, lists the average nationwide salary for User Experience Directors at $121,269, User Experience Managers at $94,752, Usability Managers at $87,886, User Researchers at $83,161, UX Practitioners at $81,413; User-Centered Design Practitioners $79,274; Information Architects at $78,755, and finally Interface Designers at $62,623. A free version of the survey is located at http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/ (The full version is available only to UPA members).

 

With a typical $10 to $100 return on investment for every dollar spent, its no wonder US News and World Report lists Usability/User Experience Specialist as a "careers with bright futures” that “offer strong outlooks and high job satisfaction."

 
About User Centered Design

Imagine that you are sitting in this mini-van seat and you want to slide the seat back. Minican Car seat with usability design issueYou would reach down under the front of the seat, feeling for the seat adjustment control. Upon feeling a lever (see arrow), and pull it. Which of the following do you think would happen? (a) Pulling the lever allowed the seat to slide smoothly back. (b) Pulling the lever detached the seat from the floor, causing the seat to fall over.

You guessed it! The seat would fall over. Pulling the lever allows one to quickly detach the seat to make room for cargo. Perhaps a little too quickly!

Most people expect to find a lever near the front of a car seat which allows the seat to slide forward or backward. Most people wouldn't expect a lever near the front of the seat to detach the seat from the floor. In fact, it could be quite dangerous to detach the seat while sitting in it!

 

(From BadDesigns (c) 1999 Mike Darnell)

 
 
 

Usability Tips and Techniques

Build upon the user's prior knowledge


  • Whenever possible try to leverage the user's past experience with your products and with items that they interact with in their everyday experience.
  • The users may already have a mental model of how to interact with your products. You need to use this knowledge to help build a system that they understand without having to read a manual or click and receive on-line help.
  • Be consistent within your organization.
  • You cannot have one portion of your product work in one way while another portion works in a completely different way. Work closely with the other business units to make sure that they are following any specific company standards or style guides that have been created for interface design.
  • Follow industry-standard guidelines for User Interface designs
  • There are many sources for UI design guidelines and these can be an invaluable resource for us. You need to make your product consistent with products from other vendors that your clients may be using.