program selection system

Agile methods provide new opportunities to create great products through tightly integrated design and development. But too often, that promise is not fulfilled. In this session, you’ll learn why that is and how leading teams make it work.

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?

Short Abstract [88 words]

Sticky notes (aka Post-it Notes [tm]) are the lingua franca of remembering pesky tasks…yet their real potential lies in effectively and rapidly organizing collaborative group work. Don’t underestimate these simple tools: it’s amazing what powerful results you can get from a $2.00 office supply investment.

LANDesk Software started developing their shrink wrapped products using a variant of extreme programming (XP) in 2002. They made significant changes to a large legacy system, but wanted to communicate better with customers. They expanded their Human Factors team to focus on this problem. The Human Factors team developed personae to integrate the user into the development process.

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.

As Agile practitioners, we recognize the need for a strong and accurate user voice on the Agile team. And yet, an Agile project leaves little time for elaborate up-front design and lengthy user research. In this session we’ll practice the User Feedback Two-Step, the dance that user representatives on a team have to play to interleave their work with the developers and with end-users. Nimble players can be ready with designed and tested user interfaces at the point where developers need them, while implementing user acceptance testing in parallel.

Achieving and maintaining a shared understanding across a team about just what a project is intended to deliver, and just why that matters, is tremendously challenging. It is also tremendously important. This workshops explores how a team can create and iterate a number of lightweight models to help both (i) build a shared and evolving understanding of the business problem and what potential solutions look like (ii) make sure they are asking the right kind of questions early. Models considered will include user, process, financial and interface / interaction (e.g. storyboards).

What’s a mental model? Those in the field of cognitive research have been defining mental models for a few decades. The term “mental model” has come to mean “a mental representation.” The mental models described in this presentation are representations of people’s behavior, philosophies, and emotion around how they accomplish something, regardless of which tools they use. Aligned with the ways you support users, mental models provide a clear roadmap of where your organization should invest its energies, and also where it shouldn’t, allowing you to stretch your limited resources.

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.