program selection system

Program Guide Description:

At Salesforce.com a waterfall-based process bogged down our first attempt at generating a traditional pattern library. In keeping with our development team’s agile transformation we revisited the process and invented Postcard Patterns – a highly visual, easy to maintain, and easy to produce communication tool.

Attendees will learn how to:
Identify Their Audience:
Who needs the patterns?
De-construct Their Application:
What are the unique building blocks?

The creation of excellent user experiences often appears to be a forgotten goal in the software development world. This paper discusses the use of a concrete method, Contextual Inquiry, which leads to insights that will help development teams create experiences and interfaces that match user needs and expectations. This method encourages Agile team members to see the world from the users’ perspective by working directly in the users’ context.

User experience designers – struggling with how to share the role of designer with engineers and other members of your agile teams? Trying to find a better way to communicate the findings of your user-centered research and establish the importance design plays in any software product? Wondering how to get your design ahead of development so you can have time for usability testing and iterative design? We’ve got the answer for you – design studio.

In this report we describe our experience with the merger of user centered design (UCD) into agile (team) development practice as manifest in a one day design studio. We will walk through our process from the preliminary design research through the conclusion of the day-long workshop that is the design studio by describing those activities in the context of one project. We will follow by enumerating and explaining the benefits we have observed from taking a studio approach to design.

Paper Prototyping Mistakes and oversights during the design and development phases can be costly, if not detrimental to a business. Paper prototyping is an excellent, low-cost method to catch these mistakes and correct them before development begins.

This highly detailed, practical, and hands on workshop will provide a framework for creating and testing paper prototypes. Here’s a brief on what we’ll cover:

• bust the common myths
• tools we use for paper prototyping
• show some working examples (yes, I did say working and I do mean interactive prototype models)

How can user experience design (UED) practices be leveraged in Agile development to improve product usability?

User experience (UX) is a relatively young field that involves a diverse set of skills and activities. UX tasks have grown in importance as the focus of product design moves away from technical possibilities and towards the usefulness, usability, suitability, and overall product experience that can help attract and retain customers. Come check out the poster near the UX stage to get an overview of what is involved in this increasingly essential discipline.