Role: User-Interface Designer
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The user-interface designer coordinates the design of the user interface. User-interface designers are also involved in gathering usability requirements and prototyping candidate user-interface designs to meet those requirements. | |||||||||||||
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Description
The user-interface designer role is not responsible for implementing the user interface. Instead, this role focuses on the design and the "visual shaping" of the user interface, by:
- capturing requirements on the user interface, including usability requirements
- building user-interface prototypes
- involving other stakeholders of the user interface, such as end-users, in usability reviews and use testing sessions
- reviewing and providing the appropriate feedback on the final implementation of the user interface, as created by other developers; that is, designers and implementers.
Related Information
This section provides links to additional information related to this role.
Staffing
Skills
The User-Interface Designer may come from a creative and visual arts background instead of a business, engineering or computer science background. The User-Interface Designer focusses on the usability of the system.
Role assignment approaches
Especially in larger projects, a separate group of people are often formed in which they all play the user-interface designer role. This group focuses primarily on the user interface and the usability aspects of the system. This is important because:
- the skills required by a user-interface designer often need to be improved and optimized for the current project and application type, with potentially unique usability requirements, and this requires both time and focus
- the risk of "mixed allegiances" must be delimited; that is, the user-interface designer needs to be influenced more by usability considerations than implementation considerations
Further Reading
See Software for Use [CON99].
