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?

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.

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.

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.

The UX Graffiti Wall, a persistent physical public display, aims to capture feedback and ideas on core issues that user experience practitioners confront in an AGILE development environment. Conference attendee contributions may be based on personal experiences or discussion surrounding session and tutorial topics.

This 30 min experience report gives attendees another perspective on how one software company is approaching selling and executing user experience projects using Agile methodologies. Specifically, we will focus on our experience and approach to expanding User Research (UR) component in our projects. We feel that UR is vital to a successful software project but is the hardest part of User Experience to sell because it is often viewed as 1) taking more time, 2) costing more money, 3) slowing down development, and 4) unnecessary (“we already know the users”).

Typically, scrum teams work best when team members are 100% allocated to the team. But what about team members that can’t be? What about teams that don’t have a member from a functional area like User Experience or TechPubs? This experience report examines how salesforce.com has handled: sharing resources between teams, and filling in gaps when a functional expert is missing from a team. Salesforce.com uses an “Office Hours” program for teams to utilize the expertise of functional experts (like writers and designers) when those experts aren’t on the team.

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)