Usability engineering begins with methods performed at the customers' site, such as field studies and contextual inquiries, in order to learn customers' tasks, environments, and needs. Usability studies are performed in usability labs on everything from rough paper prototypes to released and competitors' products.
Usability engineering is critical to perform both in research and development.
This talk will cover both the general field of usability engineering, and also the usability engineering process and labs at Sun, including a video of the labs. Bio Janice Rohn is Manager of Usability Labs and Services at Sun Microsystems. Janice joined Sun in 1992, when she founded the usability engineering group and designed and built usability labs for Sun's sites in California and Colorado. Prior to joining Sun, Janice worked at Apple on the usability and design of products such as System 7, QuickTime, the PowerBooks, and the Quadras. Prior to Apple, Janice was a research assistant at Stanford University in expert systems and medical informatics.