What do I do?
I am not a graphic artist; I don’t draw icons. To understand what I do, one of my favorite breakdowns of usable software design is Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience (view the original diagram). I have taken his diagram and placed next to it a small selection of some of the methodologies I am familiar with. This is what I do.
(Note that I disagree with JJG’s separation of information design from software design, but that is an argument for another time.)
Many thanks to Jess James Garrett for visualizing the layers of user experience design in a way that has influenced my thinking. I put the above text and graphic up on my project site. I also made a high resolution PDF for people who may want to re-use it.