About
UPA
Overview
The Usability Professionals’
Association supports usability specialists, people from all aspects of
human-centered design, and the broad family of disciplines that create
the user experience in promoting the design and development of usable
products.
Our goals are to:
- Provide an international network through which usability
professionals can share information about the techniques and methodologies
in the profession.
- Create an inclusive community for those interested
in usability, whether it is their primary focus or a related discipline.
- Change new product development processes to include
a concern for the people who use them by presenting the business case
for usability in product development to colleagues, customers, the public
and governmental agencies.
- Increase the body of knowledge about usability and
user-centered design through professional education, meetings and conventions
and other professional interchanges
Who are UPA members?
UPA members come from many different
backgrounds, meeting in the common ground of a shared interest in
creating products that meet the needs of the people who work or play with
them.
Some work full-time as usability
specialists. Others incorporate usability into their work as interface/interaction
designers, information architects, ethnographers, web design, communicators
and many other fields.
How
does usability relate to other user experience disciplines?
Usability professionals are
part of the user experience community. This community is broad and diverse,
and is still in the process of forming. We came from many different places,
but share a common vision. Because we started from different places, there
are many different names for the path – vector – that we are
on.
- Some people started in computer science and called it human-computer
interaction (HCI)
- Others who started in ergonomics called it human factors
- Or in training, and called it electronic performance support systems
- Or in library science, and called it information architecture
- Or in technical writing and started with audience analysis
- Or in branding and marketing and called it experience design
- Or in user interface design and called it usability
In the UPA, we call that goal
usability
and many of our members identify the process as user
centered design, but we recognize other disciplines and other terminology.
There's another usage for the
term "vectors" - as the way ideas spread from person to person
and community to community. In the case of "usability" there
have been many vectors (agents and directions) as practitioners and researchers
interact, learn from each other -- and change their own practices as a
result.
About UPA Membership
Learn
more about UPA membership
benefits
Download the membership
brochure (PDF)
Join
UPA now
