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.

SCRUM poses key challenges for usability. First, product goals are set without an adequate study of the user’s needs and context. The user stories selected may not be good enough from the usability perspective. Second, user stories of usability import may not be prioritized high enough. Third, given the fact that a product owner thinks in terms of the minimal marketable set of features in a just-in-time process, it is difficult for the development team to get a holistic view of the desired product or features.

Je viens de recevoir la note d’acceptation du comité de programme. J’accepte de faire cette présentation le jeudi 7 août, de 8h30 à 12h00. Je suis également prêt à refaire cette présentation le vendredi, le cas échéant.

Alain Désilets

“The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.” — Fred Brooks

Résumé

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.

After one or two years of development, many applications become excessively difficult to change. Developers waste a significant portion of their time fighting “cognitive friction” - looking for code, figuring out how to reuse existing code, understanding new APIs, making and fixing mistakes, etc. In this session, you will learn, through concrete examples, how to apply usability principles to reduce cognitive friction, helping you write code that does not become an obstacle to agility. You will take home a number of techniques that you can start applying right away.

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?