Usability in Russia.

by Ekaterina Sugak

Russian usability society was informally arisen 10 years ago in Moscow thanks to 2 people - Ivan Burmistrov and Yaroslav Perevalov - first usability engineers in "Russian Stock Exchange" Company. They created UI for dealers that needed a very evident and informative interface for stressful stock on-line activity. It was the same beginning of our developing.

Year by year more people came from Psychology, Ergonomics, developing and design fields to become usability-engineers in different IT or web companies. For last 2-3 years we increased the number of members remarkably and now we are a formal society RusCHI of about 40 official members.

Some of us work as usability engineers employees in Usability Departments of corporations (Netcracker.com, RTS.ru, Usabilitylab.ru). Others provide usability consulting as joint ventures for wide circle of companies (http://usethics.ru/en/; http://eng.uidesign.ru/ ). We also have a part of members that are interested in this field and provide usability partly in their every-day practice.

For efficient communication we provide regular seminars to discuss last researches, ideas, to argue and agree, finding compromises and get the best way to interact with each other. This is a very usual and at the same time very important activity for each usability society - to share knowledge, aware business and IT people of this process, growing up the about-society persons and develop each other as a high-professional group. Some of our members visit international conferences. We also have a Usability Forum on Usability.ru and LiveJournal sites for on-line communication.

In 2006 we officially took part in WUD with two events at one day: Conference for a IT-company that provides business-accounting in Russia and Conference for RusCHI society with reports, overviews, slides and free discussions about everyday issues, common problems and ways of growing.

These sorts of activity make pay more attention of IT society to us, we are ordered for more specialists in this field. So studying is the most important issue for current day. We have a very few Ergonomics courses in High schools but they concern general ergonomic principles, without GUI specific. We are going to develop this knowledge and provide detailed courses for students that graduate basic HF education. Thanks to our deep psychological and engineering traditions in Ergonomics (60-70-80ths) we've kept a lot of scientist experience how to analyze user activity, what restrictions are in psychology of perception, what phenomena are faced in engineering and cognitive psychology. All these patterns are successfully applied in new reality - virtual user activity and interactions.

We look forward very positive to grow up Russian professional society as a part of international usability movement and invite all of you to join us.

Sincerely yours,
Senior Usability Engineer,
Ph.D.in Psychology,
Ekaterina Sugak

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