I am an Industrial Designer with 5 years of work experience. After graduating in ID, I worked at a corporation 2 years and I’m now doing freelance work. Since most of my work involve very little user research due to time constraints, I am feeling unsatisfied with my career. I want to do more than re-skinning products or think of new features. I also hate spending countless hours doing 3-D modeling on the PC. What would be way more gratifying to me is to spend more time studying user-product interaction, conduct usability research, analyzing the data, make recommendations to the design team, and work with the design team to make the product a reality.
I’d like to know which graduate schools have good reputation for their Masters in human factors/ergonomics program. Am I going in the right direction or does Masters in I.D. make more sense?
Hello,
I am an ID graduate student at the Ohio State University. We have similar interests with you. So far I am very happy about the courses that I took from Indusrial Systems Engineering.
You should look for the cognitive engineering stuff. I also recommend “design of everyday things”. It is a book from Donald Norman.
I think cognitive engineering is a very satisfying field for ID person.
Good luck for your studies.
I’m pretty sure grad work in HF would require a hefty undergrad course-load first to get up to speed. Perhaps the ‘design methodology’ degree at IIT? I think CMU has something similar within ID.
Try contacting asomeone at Design Science and ask them what an ideal resume looks like: http://www.dscience.com/
Thank you for your feedback. I’m also wondering about job outlook for human factors specialist or usability analyst in the consumer products industry. Is it a fast growing profession? Would it be difficult to find a job after graduation? How’s the pay compared to ID?