Usability in Movies...

watch this movie and this may give a clear picture what Usability mean..!

Comparing UXD Business Models

This manifest need for UX leaders to learn—and share—best practices was the rationale for the authors, Jim Nieters and Garett Dworman, to write and present a CHI 2007 Experience Report on the organizational structure that Jim Nieters created for his UX group at Cisco

[1]. It also motivated us to follow up that presentation with a CHI 2007 Management Special Interest Group (SIG), “Comparing UXD Business Models,” in which participants compared different models of UX organizational design

[2]. Our intent was to share experiences and systematically explore them in the hope that this information will aid companies in structuring their internal UX functions. To this end, we generated SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analyses of four UX business models.

Visit: uxmatters to read the complete article

Feel proud to be a UX'er...

Usability Experience Specialist is considered as Top30 careers for 2009
Overview: This profession has a hard time agreeing on a name for itself. It's called, for example, user experience specialist, interface designer, information architect, usability practitioner, user-centered design specialist, and usability manager.

Whatever you call them, their job is to help ensure that products, especially technical ones, are easy and pleasurable to use. How? First, they observe and interview potential users to identify their needs and preferences. They may conduct a task analysis to break down the user experience of a product to its component parts and make suggestions for each. After a prototype is developed, they may watch and interview potential users again and suggest revisions. Usability specialists may work, for example, on voting machines, the next generation iPhone, a medical imaging machine, an athletic shoe production line, a shopping website, or a bricks-and-mortar store.

A potential downside of this career is that shortsighted companies believe they can make products without a specifically trained usability expert, so you may have to spend considerable time justifying your service's value. Another drawback is that you may need to make efforts to avoid being typecast as someone who can help design only one kind of product.
Those concerns are usually dwarfed by the ongoing creativity and the good feeling of continually creating products that are a pleasure to use.

A Day in the Life. Because you're the only usability specialist in your company, you're involved in all stages of the product development process. You might actually never get to participate in all aspects in one day, but here, we'll suspend that bit of reality so you can get a better idea of what the career is like.

Is this intresting and want to read more... http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/best-careers/2008/12/11/best-careers-2009-usability-experience-specialist.html

UX Groups

Usability World
Usability World is a group of professionals from India which includes Usability Engineers, Usability Analysts, Interaction Designers, UI Designers, User Experience Designers having vast experience in Usability, User Interface Design, User Centric Design, Usability Analysis, User Experience Management, Visual Design, Art Direction, media Design, Product Design, Accessability, User Testing, HCI, and Human Factors.

UPA Hyderabad
A local UPA chapter(http://www.upahyderabad.org)exclusively for HCI enthusiasts in hyderabad working in the field of Usability Engineering & Human Comptuer Interaction Design. A free platform to share news and resources in HCI. A forum open to all people from Art, Design, Research, Testing, Documentation, & Students in Hyderabad.

Design IndiaInteraction platform for Professional Designers of all kinds. Product designers, Graphic designers, Fashion Designers, Animators, Illustrators. NID, IDC, Srishti, NIFT , Symbiosis or from other colleges.
Faculty, practicing designers, journalists, writers all welcome.STUDENTS who are doing their industrial trainings and or final projects are welcome to join in too. Students must mention the year and diploma project.

CHI MumbaiCHI Mumbai a ACM chartered special interest group for professionals in the field of Human Computer Interaction based out of Mumbai region in India. CHI Mumbai brings together people working on the design, evaluation, implementation, and study of interactive computing systems for human use. CHI Mumbai provides a national, interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas about the field of human-computer interaction HCI).

HCIIDC
This group is related to human-computer interaction design. We discuss interaction design, usability, information architecture and related fields. It is primarily a group of professionals from India. Students and those not from India are welcome too.