Bryan, with all due respect, I think there is a big difference between the 'ability to empathize with human behavior' and a structured background in psychology, especially the cognitive side. What has bothered me about the Nielsen thread is the patronizing attitude that graphic designers have special magical skills that the rest of us could never understand, while the user experience people have the easy job of testing and maybe some understanding of pop psychology that's quite commonsense to begin with.
I think that what we need to maintain our credibility as professionals are solid arguments for why we do (or dare I say why we design) things a certain way, and arguments like 'I can empathize with users' or 'I have the magic touch' just don't cut it. Lucy, to answer your question, in my experience, a pretty large percentage of human factors professionals (many of whom do work as IAs and interaction designers, as well as user researchers) have psychology in their background. It is probably one of the four most common paths to the profession - the other being programming, graphic design, and documentation. -eva -- http://www.linkedin.com/in/kaniasty ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
