forUSE 2003 - Full Program

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Second International Conference on Usage-Centered Design

TOPIC - User Performance & Performance Support

PRE-CONFERENCE TUTORIALS
SUNDAY - 19 October

B2 - 9:00a-5:00p

Performance Support Systems: What They Are, Why They are Important and How to Build Them

Gloria Gery, Gery Associates

There are twenty plus attributes and behaviors of performance-centered systems which result in immediate usability and a dramatic reduction in training in both the application itself and the related business domains, processes, procedures and concepts. This tutorial will use examples from many software applications to describe and operationalize these attributes. Gloria will also discuss the analysis, design and development processes necessary to generate successful performance-centered systems. Finally, the political barriers to achieving results will be explored.

B3 - 9:00a-5:00p

Representing Work for the Purpose of Design

Karen Holtzblatt, inContext Enterprises

What do you do with field data to see the big picture of the users? How do you see opportunities for increasing productivity or and defining new products? Who are the people you are designing for? How can technology enhance their work practice? How do you drive high-level use cases with user data? This tutorial introduces key Contextual Design work models and shows how to use them to vision product solutions and drive use cases. Learn to use modeling techniques such as the affinity diagram, flow model, and sequence models to represent your user population, its issues, and tasks. Understand how to use this data to identify solutions that really meet user need and increase business value. Learn about using the visioning process and storyboards to show how field data is used to define requirements and work out high-level use cases. The tutorial combines lecture, example, practice, and discussion.

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.

M21 - 11:00a-12:30p

Designing for Breakthroughs in User Performance

Jeannine Strope, McKesson

Supporting users who have hundreds of mission-critical tasks—performed outside of the actual software yet recorded in the software application—requires a task-driven design with a streamlined, efficient, almost anticipatory workflow. McKesson Clinicals took the opportunity to revamp and rewrite legacy applications using usage-centered design to create a world class clinical system. Along the way we reached great heights in design and encountered great pitfalls in technology and temperament, all the while trying to balance market demand with design priorities. This session presents our hands-on design and lessons learned in employing usage centered design with an agile development process to create task-critical applications..

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.

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.

M41 - 3:30p-5:00p

Instructive Interaction: Innovating Without Inundating Your Users

Larry Constantine, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.

Radical improvements often demand unconventional designs. Industry-leading results do not come from me-to designs based on slavish adherence to standards and conventions. Fortunately, even radically non-standard user interfaces can be made completely intuitable with the right visual and interaction design. Instructive interaction is a proven approach that has been used successfully in complex commercial products to enable users to master novel features immediately. Through a combination of both novel and established techniques, user interfaces can be made self-teaching. This session will show how genuine breakthroughs in user performance can be achieved through innovative designs without compromising ease of learning or support for new users. The necessary preconditions for single-trial learning will be outlined and the basic approaches to instructive interaction will be illustrated with copious examples from real-world products in a variety of applications areas.

TUESDAY - 21 October

T23 - 10:30a-12:00n

Designing for Performance Using Usage-Centered Design

Helmut Windl, Siemens AG

New software applications like Windows XP, Office 2003, and Windows Movie Maker 2 show that user interfaces are turning radically from being object-oriented to task and performance support. At first sight, usage-centered design seems to be the perfect approach to design such systems, but a closer inspection reveals that usage-centered design has to be slightly refined to do the performance support job. This session shows how to use usage-centered design to create systems that follow the electronic performance support system (EPSS) philosophy. It covers the necessary extensions and refinements to the usage-centered design models and process.

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.

T42 - 3:30p-5:00p

Making Mistakes Well: Improving Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Web Crisis Points

Matt Linderman and Jason Fried, 37signals

This session is an exploration of on-line contingency design; the art and science of preventing visitor mistakes and helping visitors get back on track once a problem does occur. Come learn the top contingency design rules that can radically improve your site's customer experience, usability, and conversion rates. Plus, see the best and worst of contingency design in action. The class will analyze and evaluate the crisis point handling of major sites, including Amazon, Walmart, E*Trade, Google, Yahoo!, Citibank, SprintPCS, eBay and others. You'll leave the session inspired and armed with real world solutions that can improve your site immediately.

WEDNESDAY - 22 October

W31 - 1:30p-3:00p

Making Usage More Productive: Leveraging Usage-Centered Design for Improved Performance

Lucy Lockwood, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.

One of the hallmarks of usage-centered design is its focus on the tasks - the actual work -that users of a system are trying to accomplish. Whether the software is a traditional business or desktop application, a web site, or embedded in a phone or medical device, focusing design on supporting usage pays off dramatically in terms of increasing user productivity and performance. Supported by exercises and examples, learn how to leverage the methods and models of usage-centered design to streamline task steps, speed task completion, reduce errors, reduce user stress, and support expanded task performance. Find out how to make the case to management that increased productivity, lower error rates, and faster learning all translate into an improved bottom line for your company, organization, clients, and customers.

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