And when users don't accept that product, development teams rather blame the user for being too stupid to use the thing right than accept that they've misjudged the user or the context in which the product is used. I find it a challenge to operate on this border line and to bring the user-perspective and even the users themselves into the development process. The role of an external usability consultant After my short academic career, I became a consultant in technical communication and user interface design. I developed on-line user manuals and executed user interface design tasks as an external consultant in a wide range of companies and sectors, from banking to telecommunications and internet. Despite the wide range of projects and tasks, I experienced a major bottleneck in the role of an external usability consultant.
External consultants are firemen.
They are called when the fire hits the roof. For usability, that usually means when users use the first version of the product and don't like what they get. Oh, and we can't do any major changes because our next release is in two weeks and the programming team is busy fixing bugs until then. So if you could limit your solutions to cosmetic changes that would be great. Usability problems can nearly never be solved with cosmetic changes.