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)

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