Q&A - so what do you do, anyway?

I've spent a fair amount of time in the past few weeks travelling to talk to customers, Mac user groups, and usability classes. I received many questions during these presentations. They were great questions, and answering them helps me think about what I do and how I can improve upon it, as well as thinking about what the Macintosh Business Unit does and how we can improve upon it.

One of the questions that I've been asked frequently comes down to, 'so what is it that you do?'. My title is 'user experience researcher', which probably don't mean anything unless you're already working in software development. The short answer that I give is that it's my job to make our software easier for you to use. My previous post reviews an article that discusses some of the methods that are used in my field. This doesn't give you a full answer about what I do, but it's a pretty good start. If you'd like to see what I do from the point of view of a user, you can sign up to be a participant in our usability studies; most studies are conducted in Redmond, WA, or Mountain View, CA, but (as I mentioned above) I travel to meet users in their home environment.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 21, 2006
  I am a (Windows) programmer by day and a Mac user by night. I code (in vim!) on a terminal server full of VMwares and occasionally use VirtualPC for dev (but only rarely).