One way to look at the vocation of usability professionals is as a group of expert dumb-downers:

When the federal government was creating its informational Web site (now known as usa.gov), it brought in usability experts to look for flaws. By watching users, the site’s creators found that people were having trouble finding an individual agency’s Web site because they did not know which department to look under.

“Even people in the Washington, D.C., area didn’t know that,” said Janice Redish, a usability consultant who worked on the project in February 2002. “It was an easy fix once we knew it.”

It’s an essential dumb-downing exercise, though. Especially when it comes to tech applications, there’s a constant disconnect between the codemonkeys that create the product, and developing easily-accessible nodes for a non-techie audience — i.e., the customer — to actually use said product. Consumer product lines live and die by such design tenets, and as the tech industry moves more and more into that same realm, factoring in non-engineering input becomes crucial.

I’d like to think I’d be well-suited for some level of this work. Something to keep in my personal career-development file.