There is an age-old debate regarding whether human factors/usability professionals should play the role of police or collaborative team member. While the prevalent practice is that we avoid the authoritarian role of “police”, two questions remain: 1) is the softer approach really working in most organizations? and 2) which role will ensure usability when development is outsourced? This panel will explore usability cultures and challenges in several different government and industry organizations. Panel members from NASA will present some advances in developing usability requirements for verifying contractor products, and will describe recent work to objectify usability-related characteristics, such as consistency and legibility. Panel members representing large (Hewlett-Packard) and small (Extreme Networks) information technology companies will describe their unique challenges and attempts made toward ensuring usability of their products.
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