Who are Usability Engineer , UI Designer , Information Architect, User Experience Designer, Human factors specialist, web designer, Product Designers, Interaction designers?
:: These are some of the many names coined for the same profession. Some companies call by one name and other companies by other. More or less they all mean same. There are quite chances that each of these role may distribute tasks from the world of HCI.
eg- UI designer is supposed to only do Design., Usability Engineer is suppose to only do User Testing, etc.

What is the role of UI Designers ?
:: As the name of their profession suggest, they make applications easy to use, more intuitive, they design interactions keeping User tasks in mind. That's called User Centered Design(UCD) Process. Typically the deliverables from such people are design mockups in word, html, ppt or flash, User scenarios, competitor feature analysis. They interact with Product Manager/Solution Manager/Client/Marketing and with developers and Testing people.

What is the Qualifications of UI Designer ?
:: Normally they are from the background of Industrial Design & Visual communication. Such education is offered at IDC IIT Bombay , IIT Guwahati, IIT Kanpur, IIT Delhi, IISC Bangalore, National Institute of design(NID). Some people with education in Fine Arts(BFA) and Commercial Arts have also joined as UI Designers. But these people don't have subjects like ergonomics, Human factors, cognitive psychology, Engineering sciences and Management in their education. But some of these folks have learnt these externally through training and are efficiently performing UI designer roles. People with Architecture education are also in this field because Architecture teaches you indirectly designing for people under constrains. Apart from that I have seen people with BSc education too in this field. They attend courses from C-DAC to learn tools like photoshop, dreamweaver & illustrator.
A new bread of people with Industrial Engineering course done from US universities are in India. They have HCI as an Elective subject or they do their thesis in HCI. But this course is not a Design course. This course does not teaches you design & creativity. They do critics on other's design. Industrial Engineering is normally about Man-Machine study for Manufacturing industry. They do time & motion study for shop floor layout. These people normally do Testing work only.

.:: Being called as user experience expert, they are suppose to know how user will interact with the application. They should be well aware of Software Development Life Cycle(SDLC), technology behind the application. Little bit of HTML, C++, Java Script, etc. But they need not do actual coding. They are suppose to guide developers in defining work flow of the software, defining the layout, menu, buttons, Fonts, texts labels, etc.

What is the Role & qualification of Graphic designer?
Graphic designers design overall color scheme and design direction. They design icons, application graphics, color schemes, CSS, etc. They have education in Visual communication or BFA.

What are usability Engineers ?
Usability Engineers are suppose to measure how usable is the design from a UI designer. They conduct Usability tests. They have education in Human Factors or HCI or psychology or Industrial Engineering(US).. Some companies call UI designers as Usability Engineers.

What tools UI Designers use ?
:: They may use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, illustrator, Word, Power point, Visio to create prototypes to demonstrate the interaction behavior to Developers or management. They may use these prototypes to test user reactions. But they don't use these tools to actually create a code. So one should not expect coding from them.

Which companies in India have Usability Engineers?
:: Recently due to awareness in Usability Engineering lot of companies are hiring UI Designers. Earlier most of the Indian companies were involved in just doing coding. The basic UI design was supplied by US counter part and the rest of the coding work done by Indians. But recently the talent pool of Indian UI designer has increased as more and more offshore development centers are set up by US companies in India. So this required hiring of UI designer with Development team. The number of UI designers in a company range from 2 to 20 to 100 depending on the number of projects.

Which Companies have Usability Engineers and UI designers ?
5 yrs back in year 2000 i had written few names of companies. But today at 2006 i dont have to list the names of companies. Because almost all the companies in India have UI teams. Here are some -

Infosys, Cognizant, Veritas, MBT, HCL, Sun, IBM, Mindtree, Oracle, TCS, Wipro, UGS, CA, Microsoft, HP, have dedicated Usability Engineering Department and UI designers.

Short training and Workshops
People interested to change their careers or move from other fields to HCI can take some workshops and training.
1) Humanfactors International: They offer year around training in HCI at Bangalore and Mumbai. They have 3 workshops with days ranging from 1 -3. Typical fees are in the range for 17000 to 18000 per class(travel & accommodation not included). Check their site for details. Not all companies recognize their certification but majority have started now.

2) IIT Mumbai 3 months distance learning : Prof. Anirudha Joshi use to conduct this distance learning HCI course and he also had 5days class room course that taught basic of HCI like, affordances, mapping, cognitive psychology, User center design, Usability testing, prototying, wireframes, etc...I had attended his class room course in 2000. But recently i am not seeing such activities in 2006

3) Usability workshop by Dnyaneshwar Vidyapeeth (Trust) Pune. This is fairly new course started but one can afford individually. This is again 4 day course costing about Rs6000 - Rs8000. Mr. Atul Manohar from Genesis is main initiator

4) Easy (chi-southindia): Pradeep Henry from cognizant has started this ACM chapter . I have seen them organizing a one day CHI conference every year at Bangalore, the cost of which is around Rs3500. I have attended their two conferences in 2005 and 2006. I won a design competition at Easy2006 conference.

5) Indo European Systems Usability Partnership Prof Andy Smith along with other indian folks have started some activities in HCI. I attended their IHCI 2004 conference in Bangalore. But after that i have not heard anything.

HCI Communities in India, ACM chapters in India, CHI associations in India
http://www.indiaupa.com : a UPA chapter started by people mostly in Pune.
www.chi-southindia.org : a ACM chapter mostly by people in Chennai
www.designinindia.net : a design derictory in India.

View few sites on HCI like :
You can learn more about HCI in India or Usability in India by subscribing to mailing list: hciidc @ yahoo groups.c om

http://www.slostc.org/topics/usability/resources_list.html
http://www.infodesign.com.au/usabilityresources/general/default.asp
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/
http://hcibib.org/

Disclaimer: These are my personal views and there is no evidence to support my statements.

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