Resources
UK UPA Salary Survey 2007
We are currently running the UK UPA Salary Survey 2007 for those working in any area related to usability. If you would like to participate please follow this link to the survey. Results will be published on this site as well as on various discussion lists. If you have any problems accessing the survey please contact us.
UPA 2007 Conference: Patterns - Blueprints for Usability
The annual UPA conference took place in June in Austin, Texas. This year, the focus was patterns in usability and how, as usability professionals, our ability to observe users and to discover their patterns of interaction is integral to our work.
For more information on the conference, including presentations, papers, and workshop details see the UPA main site.
UPA 2006 conference
Last month members from the UK Chapter attended the annual UPA conference in Denver. This Podcast includes interviews from the conference with Steve Krug, Jacob Nielsen and Larry Constantine. Shawn Henry of WAI also talks about the new WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines.
UK UPA 2004 salary survey
Download the 2004 salary survey as a PDF (293kb)
Introduction
Are you getting richer?
Talking to usability business managers this year, two themes emerge.
Firstly, that it’s been another solid year for the industry. Everyone reports being busy, everyone is recruiting or at least looking to improve capacity and with areas such as mobile becoming mainstream, confidence is high.
Secondly, despite the bullish marketplace, the memory of the .com crash still influences business planning. Usability business managers are looking to grow organically and hiring conservatively.
Maybe that’s why, this year, overall salary levels in our survey remain almost identical to last year. The mean salary increased just 0.6% in the past year.Usability professionals in the UK must look to promotion, rather than wage inflation, to improve their lot.
Expanded results
This year, for the first time, we’ve included results by employer as well as information on the types of technique in use today and a breakdown of salary by experience. Members of the Usability Professionals’ Association are, of course, entitled to the raw data so that they can conduct their own analysis.
About the HTML & PDF versions
This year, we have tried to make our results more accessible by publishing them in HTML format as well as PDF (which includes useful graphs which cannot be rendered as HTML). In the future, we hope to continue to improve the accessibility of our surveys and welcome feedback from readers.
Giles Colborne (President, UK Chapter) January 2005
UK UPA Internships and Work Experience
The UK UPA internship scheme offers our members the opportunity to experience usability and user-centred design in practice.
** Please note that the scheme is currently inactive, until March 2008 ***
Key questions to ask your usability supplier (112k PDF)
This document gives you some of the key questions you should ask your usability supplier and explains what to listen for in their answers. You can use it as a checklist during invitations to tender, when interviewing usability providers or when reviewing proposal documents.
Ask Jeeves UK Interview
Myles Runham, Director of Research and Planning at Ask Jeeves UK discusses the nature of usability for him and his organisation.
Interview with AOL UK
Mark Uttley, Senior Research Manager at AOL UK, talks to the UK UPA and discusses his approach to working with the usability community.
Morae from Techsmith
TechSmith, the people behind Camtasia software, have recently launched a new usability testing product, Morae.
Morae records both computer and user events, as well as capturing camera video - you only need a USB webcam and a microphone to complete a mobile usability lab. There's a considerable amount of software functionality, including remote viewing, sophisticated indexing and search, and picture-in-picture image display.
See the TechSmith website for more information.