forUSE 2003 - Full Program

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Second International Conference on Usage-Centered Design

TOPIC - Management Issues

MONDAY

M10 - 9:30a-10:30a

KEYNOTE: Performance by Design

Bill Buxton, Buxton Design

This keynote might be titled "What I have learned about software product design in 8 1/2 years of working with some of the best industrial designers and film makers in the world." By design, I do not mean code design. Rather, I use the term in the way that it would be understood by an industrial or graphic designer. In software development, product design and software engineering are not well differentiated. Far too often, the result is a product that is late, over budget, short of features, high on bugs, and underperforms in the marketplace. Overall, software companies have a far better track record with incremental releases than with new product design. To put the lessons I have learned into perspective, I will work through a case study which suggests that my education was time well spent--as well as fun.

M23 - 11:00a-12:30p

Guides and Guards: Designing Software that Supports and Protects the User

Burton Huber, Ariel Performance Centered Systems, Inc.

While software has evolved as a mass-produced consumer product, it has yet become a safe and comfortable place for people to work. Training is still compensatory and errors are made too dangerous and costly. Imagine how many fingers were lost to saw blades before employee advocates forced factories to install guides and guards? Designing software that supports and protects the user is still a “craft”, performed by select practitioners. To make quality software that guides and guards the user “standard equipment”, we must explore the necessary steps to incorporate good design as part of the mass production process. Arguments based on competitive advantage, bottom line impact, customer value, and productivity combined with today’s powerful development and delivery tools demonstrate we have the technology to do more than push data. Still only change-savvy champions who understand both the benefits and the organization’s dynamics will be able to institutionalize user-focused characteristics into software design.

M31 - 1:30p-3:00p

Usage-Centered Design in Extreme Programming and Agile Software Development Environments

Jeff Patton, Tomax Corporation

Agile development methodologies, and Extreme Programming in particular, advocate deferring design decisions till the last possible minute. How in this type of environment can you successfully practice Usage-Centered Design or other sound user interface and interaction design practices? This presentation will give an overview of Agile development concepts and Extreme Programming as a specific and most popular Agile methodology. In fact, Usage-Centered Design modeling techniques work well to generate the broad scope and priorities necessary to make agile development methodologies work well. The session discusses using Usage-Centered Design as a quick collaborative approach for gathering requirements and building functional design. Learn how to use Usage-Centered Design artifacts such as role and task models to drive project planning and keep development focused on the most important thing: producing software actually usable by people.

M32 - 1:30p-3:00p

Software Product Design: From Theory into Practice

Bill Buxton, Buxton Design

This presentation addresses the pragmatics of the structure and practice of the design process. Issues discussed include team composition, techniques for "sketching" interaction, the difference between the engineering and design notions of prototypes, and reconciling the design of the product, its business/marketing plan, and manufacturing/engineering plan before green-lighting. This session will be highly interactive, based on audience participation, but grounded on a few key case studies.

M33 - 1:30p-3:00p

Workspace Portals: Supporting Work, Integrating Resources and Enabling Learning

Gloria Gery, Gery Associates

Technology enables many new approaches to performance development and learning. Successful organizations design workspaces which provide users the proper resources filtered based on the logical context. This session will focus on determining what should be the references, what should be supported, what should be taught and what should be collaborated upon. Learn how your organization can then integrate required resources into new Workspace Portals to permit access by Kind of Resource (e.g. reference, tools, instruction, etc.), Work Process (e.g. process, activity and task) or other organizing schema. An overarching framework will be provided and sample portal environments will be demonstrated. Making just-in-time, just-enough, best-represented resources will be emphasized.

TUESDAY - 21 October

T22 - 10:30a-12:00n

Can Designers Dance? Surviving Agile Teams and Astringent Customers

Arlen Bankston, C.C. Pace Systems

Interaction design’s multifaceted nature and varied constituents have often led to confused roles, bruised egos, and broken teams. The successful design practitioner blends technical and aesthetic skills with those of the diplomat, defusing conflicts, supporting positions, and engineering constructive compromises. This presentation will demonstrate how the interaction designer can work within agile methods such as Extreme Programming to bring peace, goodwill and usable products to the most fractious projects. Case studies will illustrate how this role has been maneuvered to a pivotal position in several initially hostile environments.

T31 - 1:30p-3:00p

Tools and Techniques for Developing Performance Support Solutions

Gary Dickelman, EPSScentral.com

This session provides an independent, objective overview of the latest tools and methodologies for creating electronic performance support systems. Get an in-depth analysis of the technical needs, available protocols, development lifecycles, and how the latest and greatest tools are used in context. Real-world examples will be presented, along with return on investment metrics. Find out about the capabilities of outstanding performance support development tools, see in-production examples of solutions and how they were developed using the tools, learn the latest criteria for determining if an EPSS development tool has the right stuff for solving the performance problem that it claims to address.

T33 - 1:30p-3:00p

Iterative Project Planning with Extreme Programming

Chet Hendrickson, Independent Consultant; Ron Jeffries, XProgramming.com

What does it take to build software iteratively, in a way that satisfies the customer and supports your company's bottom line? This session will explore how Extreme Programming and Essential Use Cases can be used to build software solutions that meet your organization’s needs. Learn how the planning decisions you make can impact your project and your company. Find out how Essential Use Cases and the practices of Extreme Programming work together to support successful iterative, customer-centered development.

T41 - 3:30p-5:00p

Agile Customer-Side Practices

Tom Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC

Extreme Programming and other agile methods are quite specific about developer side practices and how the developer side and customer side interact, but they are silent on how to create an effective user interface. This presentation advocates usage centered design as the core of customer side practices. Incremental development of essential use cases and essential UI models can fit naturally into the iteration cycles of an agile project. Essential use cases are then extended to full-dress form so that functional customer tests can be directly specified from the essential use cases. These tests tell the developer side when they are done with a collection of stories. This presentation also discusses the practice of evolving and using a ubiquitous domain language for the project to ensure that business rules and domain concepts are accurately implemented and validated. The domain language is used in the use cases, the essential user interface model, the code, and the tests.

WEDNESDAY - 22 October

W23 - 10:30ap-12:00n

Adopting Agility: Usability and Design for Extreme Programming and Other Agile Methods

Gary Macomber, HumanCentric Design; Thyra Rauch, IBM

Agile methods and extreme programming are a radical shift in product development. The challenge to usage-centered design is to adapt to complement these styles or risk losing a place at the table. A major problem with usage-centered design is the perception that development is held up until the front end work is complete, the front end work being mostly usage-centered design activities. Thus, many perceive usage-centered design as being “too costly” for development schedules. Do usage-centered design practitioners have to abandon their methods to work with agile development styles? NO! This work is even more critical in agile approaches. Traditional software development is done in stages: discovery, design, development, and deployment. All the work on each stage is completed before the next stage starts. In contrast, the agile styles get something to the user quickly and create mini-products in each iteration by going through all of the stages. We believe that many usage-centered design methods can easily be meshed with agile methods. By their very nature, these front-end methods focus on the most important things first, which means that you can develop in short iterations, and work from global to specific in critical chunks.

W32 - 1:30p-3:00p

Customer Centered Planning: User Research as a Management Tool

John Zapolski, Wells Fargo & Co.; Jared Braiterman, jaredRESEARCH

Usability has become increasingly accepted as a method for producing quality interactive products. This presentation argues that customer experience research can play a significant role not only in the development of higher quality products, but also as a technique useful for organization planning and the management of technology investments. This perspective represents a shift in focus from user interface testing to creation of customer-centered organizations. The presentation draws on real world examples of in-house and consulting work in financial services, educational toys, digital startups, non-profit foundations and other interactive media.

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Full Program

Pre-Conference Tutorials

Plenary Sessions

Short Presentations

TOPIC THREADS -

User Performance & Performance Support

Visual & Interaction Design