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Second International Conference on Usage-Centered Design

FULL PROGRAM

PRE-CONFERENCE TUTORIALS
SATURDAY - 18 October

A1 - 8:30a-5:30p

Usage-Centered Design: A Crash Course in Designing for Use

Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.

This intensive, hands-on tutorial provides a practical introduction to usage-centered design, a proven, industrial-strength process with an established track record on varied development projects from modest XP applications to very large-scale systems. Participants will gain experience in using simplified, agile techniques to quickly organize information about users and user tasks into concise models for driving the visual and interaction design. They will learn how abstract models of user roles, task cases, and abstract user interface prototypes can lead to better designs and dramatic improvements in user performance and ease of learning. The major focus will be on task modeling with essential use cases, which serve as a common thread throughout an integrated usage-centered software development process. Work on a case study problem will provide practice in applying the models and methods of usage-centered design.

SUNDAY - 19 October

B1 - 9:00a-5:00p

From Usage-Centered Design to Object-Oriented Design

Robert Biddle, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Usage-Centered Design has introduced new principles for beginning the design of user interfaces. This tutorial teaches you how these same ideas can be used to link to Object-Oriented Design of systems. In particular, you will learn how task cases can work together with responsibility-driven design to increase guidance during design and increase traceability between requirements and design. This also turns out to be a good way to learn object-oriented design, and for user interface designers and system developers to learn more about each others’ world. The tutorial also shows how these techniques relate to ideas in agile methods and to object-oriented design patterns.

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.

B4 - 9:00a-5:00p

Agile Usage-Centered Modeling for Setting Scope, Goals, and Priorities

Jeff Patton, Tomax Corporation

Agile development methodologies advocate deferring design decisions as long as possible. This is commonly misinterpreted to mean “don’t design.” While leaving options open is valued, agile methodologies also place strong emphasis on understanding what goals the software should meet to provide value to its users. The methods and models found in Usage-Centered Design are ideally suited to help users and developers collaborate to discover those goals and their priorities. This tutorial will provide you with hands on experience using collaborative card-based techniques to explore a real-world business problem and successfully identify and model user roles, tasks and interaction contexts. You’ll see how you can easily involve developers and end-users to provide valuable shared understanding of the project goals. We’ll engage in this process with the explicit goal of arriving at a prioritized list of features and a project schedule that can feed easily into your favorite agile methodology. You’ll walk away with a clear understanding of how to use Usage-Centered Design to jump-start an agile project with the strong set of goals and priorities that are key to any projects success.

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..

M22 - 11:00a-12:30p

Forum: Research and Teaching

Robert Biddle, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (Moderator)

This session presents multiple short presentations on current work by those teaching and doing research in the area of usage-centered design and modeling, evaluation techniques, and tool support.

Learning and Doing Expert Evaluation: A Dilemma in Teaching User-Centered Design

Jarinee Chattratichart, Diana Cave, Andreea Vaduva, London Metropolitan University

User-interface design courses are often run within a single semester, a time span too short for students to be able to correctly apply the theoretical knowledge acquired through lectures and the literature throughout the whole design process. This presentation reports on our student-centered approach to teaching user-interface design to undergraduate students with a focus on the dilemma that by the time requirements gathering and design solution phases are satisfactorily completed there is little time left for evaluating the design solutions. Further we face the challenge in which knowledge about and application of expert review methods must be effectively introduced to students who are by definition non-experts. This paper presents case studies highlighting the difficulties students experienced with actually using a heuristic evaluation method in evaluating their web design solutions and how these problems could be overcome using HE-Plus, an extended version of the heuristic evaluation method.

Cognitive Walkthroughs vs. Usability Testing: Experiences Using Evaluation Techniques to Improve Design

Yong Liu, Indiana University

This paper presents a case study based on developing a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) administration GUI for the Active Spaces project at Indiana University using both a Cognitive Walkthrough approach and usability testing to improve the design. The report discusses the evaluation procedure, the initial design and the usability-improved design of the GUI. The predictions made by the Cognitive Walkthrough evaluation are then compared with the actual usability problems found in empirical usability tests. The strength and weakness of the two methodologies and their respective task scenarios are discussed. Based on the analysis, suggestions are made as to how to improve the effectiveness of the two evaluation methods while highlighting the problems that still remain open.

Re-engineering the Usability Engineering Process: Essential Requirements for Tool Support

Peter Messner, Manfred Tscheligi, Verena Giller, CURE - Center for Usability Research & Engineering

The landscape of specialized software tools supporting the many activities of usability engineering or similar processes (e.g., usage-centered design) looks rather bleak, if not desert-like. Oases do exist – tools that support the conduction of specific tasks such as building task models, logging user behavior during testing, or building lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes - but these tools hardly exchange data, nor are they organized in an integrative manner. The work-in-progress reported on aims at defining requirements for an integrated tools suite. It is based on drawbacks and improvement potentials identified through re-engineering of the usability engineering process. We describe the basic object models for process activities utilizing the concept of essential use cases and their translation into work products. These work products are the central building blocks for realizing usability engineering process activities and are the main components to be supported by an integrated tools suite. The resulting architecture supports flexible and modular development of these work products.

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.

M31 - 1:30p-3:00p

Usage-Centered Design in Extreme Programming and Agile Software Development Environments

Jeff Patton, Tomax Corporation

Agile development methodologies, and Extreme Programming in particular, advocate deferring design decisions till the last possible minute. How in this type of environment can you successfully practice Usage-Centered Design or other sound user interface and interaction design practices? This presentation will give an overview of Agile development concepts and Extreme Programming as a specific and most popular Agile methodology. In fact, Usage-Centered Design modeling techniques work well to generate the broad scope and priorities necessary to make agile development methodologies work well. The session discusses using Usage-Centered Design as a quick collaborative approach for gathering requirements and building functional design. Learn how to use Usage-Centered Design artifacts such as role and task models to drive project planning and keep development focused on the most important thing: producing software actually usable by people.

M32 - 1:30p-3:00p

Software Product Design: From Theory into Practice

Bill Buxton, Buxton Design

This presentation addresses the pragmatics of the structure and practice of the design process. Issues discussed include team composition, techniques for "sketching" interaction, the difference between the engineering and design notions of prototypes, and reconciling the design of the product, its business/marketing plan, and manufacturing/engineering plan before green-lighting. This session will be highly interactive, based on audience participation, but grounded on a few key case studies.

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.

M42 - 3:30p-5:00p

Persona-Based Expert Review: A Technique for Usefulness and Usability Evaluation

Joshua Seiden, 36 Partners

Personas are traditionally associated with the process of creating system design. But personas offer valuable advantages to usage-centered design teams during the evaluation of software systems. Persona-based expert reviews are more robust than typical expert reviews, because they combine principles-based reviewing techniques with the use of explicit user models. Persona-based reviews are particularly good at ensuring coverage during the review process. The method also excels at uncovering bad matches between system functionality and user expectations. This session will explore persona-based expert review in depth, discussing techniques to ensure your personas are well-suited for evaluation purposes, describing how personas are used during the evaluation process, and stepping through a typical software evaluation.

M43 - 3:30p-5:00p

Use Case Storyboards: Integrating Usability with RUP and UML

Jim Heumann, IBM Software Group

Use cases are a way to capture the functional requirements of a software system. To keep them simple and easy-to-read they purposely don't address either usability requirements or the user interface with which users will interact. However, both of these are vitally important to the success of any software that has significant user interaction. This session will introduce a technique, based on the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Unified Modeling Language (UML), that uses use cases as input to produce a conceptual design of the UI and to specify the usability requirements. The main outputs of this technique are Use Case Storyboards, which define the system's conceptual screens, screen content and navigation paths. Attendees will get a comprehensive introduction to how GUI's fit with use cases, including conceptual user interface design and the specification of usability requirements.

TUESDAY - 21 October

T10 - 8:30a-10:00a

Between Extreme and Unified: Where Are the Users and Usability in Development Processes?

Ivar Jacobson, Jaczone; Jim Heumann, IBM; Ron Jeffries, XProgramming.com; Jeff Patton, Tomax Corp.; Larry Constantine (Moderator)

In a lively and informative format, this plenary panel will bring together two opposing teams of authoritative panelists to compare how users, usability, and user interface design fit into modern software development. Challenges from the moderator and questions from the audience will shape a critical examination of the relative strengths and shortcomings of competing approaches across the spectrum of processes ranging from XP to RUP. .

T21 - 10:30a-12:00n

Forum: Usability Processes and Practices

Robert Biddle, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (Moderator)

This session of short presentations explores new ways to integrate and refine usability and software engineering approaches to improve the quality of software design and development. (Additional presentations to be announced.)

Usability and Other Quality Aspects Derived from Use Cases

Daniel Kerkow, Kirstin Kohler, Jörg Dörr, Fraunhofer IESE

Usability is one of several quality aspects (also referred to as nonfunctional requirements) according to ISO 9126. The elicitation of those during an early phase of the development is crucial in information systems as well as in embedded systems. Despite the practical importance of usability and additional aspects like performance and maintainability, there is rarely any guidance on how to determine and capture these requirements. We present an approach to elicit usability requirements in concert with supplementary requirements based on a use case-based specification of functional behavior. The approach has been proven in a case study with one industrial customer. It is based on a real system dealing with a mobile, interactive application to allow users monitor production activities, manage physical resources and access information.

Heuristic Evaluation Plus: Toward Usage-Centered Expert Review for Website Design

Jarinee Chattratichart, Jacquelin Brodie, London Metropolitan University

To date, comparative studies have not been able to convince the HCI community as to the reliability of “discount” usability methods such as heuristic evaluation compared to traditional usability testing. The main cause for this is a perceived lack of focus on the part of the expert evaluator(s). This lack of focus arises partly from carrying out a review without the involvement of users and their tasks - leading to a restricted understanding of the context of use. In this presentation we describe our method - HE-Plus, which extends heuristic evaluation through contextualization. We report on our studies that compared results obtained from heuristic evaluation, HE-Plus, and usability testing of the same websites and demonstrate how HE-Plus can help make heuristic evaluation more usage-centered, and hence, yield more reliable results.

Usage-Centered Design and the OPEN Process Framework

Brian Henderson-Sellers, James Hutchison, University of Technology, Sydney

Usage-Centered Design supplies a unique and comprehensive approach for the presentation and interaction design of user interfaces. Since it does not address either detailed software design (e.g. internals of objects) or larger scale project management issues, it needs to be complemented and supplemented. This paper describes the OPEN Process Framework (OPF), which offers that larger scale integrative approach. Based on a meta-model, the OPF supports method engineering but is deficient in its support of the HCI issues for which usage-centered design provides excellent support. Therefore we examine the ways in which the OPEN Process Framework and usage-centered design can co-exist in a mutually supportive environment..

T22 - 10:30a-12:00n

Can Designers Dance? Surviving Agile Teams and Astringent Customers

Arlen Bankston, C.C. Pace Systems

Interaction design’s multifaceted nature and varied constituents have often led to confused roles, bruised egos, and broken teams. The successful design practitioner blends technical and aesthetic skills with those of the diplomat, defusing conflicts, supporting positions, and engineering constructive compromises. This presentation will demonstrate how the interaction designer can work within agile methods such as Extreme Programming to bring peace, goodwill and usable products to the most fractious projects. Case studies will illustrate how this role has been maneuvered to a pivotal position in several initially hostile environments.

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.

T32 - 1:30p-3:00p

Usability by Inspection: The Collaborative Approach

Lucy Lockwood, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.

How do you find what's wrong with a user interface design before you commit it to code or put it in front of customers? Collaborative usability inspections identify usability defects quickly and reliably. Easy to learn and easy to put into practice, they have helped hundreds of organizations to improve the usability of their software, Web sites, and Web-based applications. Faster and more efficient than testing in the usability lab or in the field, inspections can provide rich feedback early in the design and development cycle. This class will introduce the basic techniques for conducting usability inspections of paper prototypes, simulations, or working software and live Web sites. You will learn how assigned roles and a carefully worked out process for structured review can help you to quickly identify and prioritize usability problems of all kinds. A live demonstration exercise will provide hands-on experience with the technique.

T33 - 1:30p-3:00p

Iterative Project Planning with Extreme Programming

Chet Hendrickson, Independent Consultant; Ron Jeffries, XProgramming.com

What does it take to build software iteratively, in a way that satisfies the customer and supports your company's bottom line? This session will explore how Extreme Programming and Essential Use Cases can be used to build software solutions that meet your organization’s needs. Learn how the planning decisions you make can impact your project and your company. Find out how Essential Use Cases and the practices of Extreme Programming work together to support successful iterative, customer-centered development.

T41 - 3:30p-5:00p

Agile Customer-Side Practices

Tom Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC

Extreme Programming and other agile methods are quite specific about developer side practices and how the developer side and customer side interact, but they are silent on how to create an effective user interface. This presentation advocates usage centered design as the core of customer side practices. Incremental development of essential use cases and essential UI models can fit naturally into the iteration cycles of an agile project. Essential use cases are then extended to full-dress form so that functional customer tests can be directly specified from the essential use cases. These tests tell the developer side when they are done with a collection of stories. This presentation also discusses the practice of evolving and using a ubiquitous domain language for the project to ensure that business rules and domain concepts are accurately implemented and validated. The domain language is used in the use cases, the essential user interface model, the code, and the tests.

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.

T43 - 3:30p-5:00p

Visual Design Patterns in Action

Jim Hobart, Classic Systems Solutions

Visual Design Patterns offer a powerful new way of applying design solutions based on specific context by telling the interaction designer when, why and how the design solution can be applied. Successfully implementing design patterns for complex user interfaces is both challenging and potentially very rewarding. Learn what a design pattern is and how can it be used in user interface design. Find out how to document and communicate a design pattern, how to use design patterns in usability testing, and learn tips and techniques for implementing design patterns within your organization. This talk will look at several design patterns in detail and then describe real world situations where they were applied successfully.

WEDNESDAY - 22 October

W10 - 8:30a-10:00a

Patterns or Process: What Works for Usage-Centered Design?

Lucy Lockwood and Larry Constantine, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.

In this head-to-head debate, two pioneers square off to confront the role and relative importance of design patterns versus process models in usage-centered design. Do patterns work? Do people actually use them? Where do they fit in the work of designers? Can process be taught? Does anyone really follow the process models as propounded? Which helps beginners more: proven patterns or systematic processes? What does each offer experienced professionals?

W21 - 10:30a-12:00n

Forum: Putting Usage-Centered Design to Work

Lucy Lockwood, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd. (Moderator)

This session of experience reports explores the perils, pains, and payoffs of usage-centered design in practice. It draws on the experiences of people who have been applying usage-centered design in a variety of settings to a range of problems.

Integrating Usage-Centered Design into the Centers for Disease Control Development Process

Ralph Lord, Northrup Grumman Mission Systems

Since October 2001 when letters containing aerosolized Anthrax were discovered in the US Postal system, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and their contractors have been developing new software systems to improve the agency’s ability to prepare for and respond to bio-terror events. The agency has also been working to standardize on a CDC version of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for its software development activities. As a member of the Software Process Engineering Group formed to customize the Unified Process, Ralph Lord led an effort to integrate usage-centered roles, activities and artifacts into both the CDC-UP and ongoing development projects. This report discusses the proposed role of “User Experience Analyst” in the CDC-UP and highlights some of the bio-terror software projects which have been positively impacted by usage-centered design activities.

Case Study: From Use Cases to User Interface Using UML

Chris Armstrong, ATC Enterprises, Inc.

This case study shows how to successfully apply Highsmith’s Adaptive Team Collaborative Process to the rapid definition of a user interface model from software requirements expressed as use cases. Over several weeks, a state organization was assisted in launching a project to build a web-based portal for the state’s supreme, appellate, and local jurisdiction judiciary. The externally viewed portal services were captured in a use case model. From the use case model, a user interface content and navigation model was developed in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This report will also review how these models were captured in Rational Rose and Rational RequisitePro and how the project’s consumables were generated automatically from the tool repository.

Usage-Centered Map Design for Mobile Services: Combining Empirical and Theoretical Findings

Alexander Zipf, University of Applied Sciences, Mainz, Germany

Interactive maps on the web and on mobile devices have become a frequently used new type of user interface. In order to enhance the usability of such an interface and to help users to understand the information presented, both the design of the map and the paradigms for interacting with the content need to be considered and formalized. Interactive maps need to be generated according to the actual usage and tasks. This requires that the tasks and usage be clearly identified. For example, for each task we need to determine what is to be displayed, how it is to be displayed and to what degree of detail. Further research deals with identifying and formalizing how factors like user preferences, interests and the situational context dynamically modify usage centered map design and interaction. First work on identifying typical tasks for mobile map applications as well as process models and user types is under way. This presentation discusses these efforts and how the results may be integrated into a general framework.

W22 - 10:30a-12:00n

Lean Feature-Driven Development of Interaction Designs

David Anderson, uidesign.net; Brian O’Byrne, JStateMachine Project

Lean Feature-Driven Development using Statechart modeling and Mediator Pattern can reduce variation in UI development with precise, right-the-first-time implementation of the interaction designer’s intent. In this approach, content models are elaborated into Statecharts that can be directly mapped to an MVC Type-II architecture and Mediator Pattern. With minor extensions, Statecharts can model complex application behavior and be mapped into UI features for tracking in Feature Driven Development. Statecharts drawn using UML modeling tools can be exported in XMI and imported into the JStateMachine engine implementing table driven Mediator and Command patterns in either a Web Servlet or JFC (Swing) environment.

W23 - 10:30ap-12:00n

Adopting Agility: Usability and Design for Extreme Programming and Other Agile Methods

Gary Macomber, HumanCentric Design; Thyra Rauch, IBM

Agile methods and extreme programming are a radical shift in product development. The challenge to usage-centered design is to adapt to complement these styles or risk losing a place at the table. A major problem with usage-centered design is the perception that development is held up until the front end work is complete, the front end work being mostly usage-centered design activities. Thus, many perceive usage-centered design as being “too costly” for development schedules. Do usage-centered design practitioners have to abandon their methods to work with agile development styles? NO! This work is even more critical in agile approaches. Traditional software development is done in stages: discovery, design, development, and deployment. All the work on each stage is completed before the next stage starts. In contrast, the agile styles get something to the user quickly and create mini-products in each iteration by going through all of the stages. We believe that many usage-centered design methods can easily be meshed with agile methods. By their very nature, these front-end methods focus on the most important things first, which means that you can develop in short iterations, and work from global to specific in critical chunks.

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.

W33 - 1:30p-3:00p

User Interface Architecture Patterns with UML

Bobbi Underbakke, ATC Enterprises, Inc.

Software architecture is an abstract concept yet it has very concrete effects on a software application’s design and how the software evolves over time. Just as the underlying software has an architecture, the user interface also has its own architecture. There are several well-known patterns for the user interface architecture that allow UI designers to set the direction for doing detailed UI design. This session will review the principles of user interface architecture with common UI patterns and then discuss how to represent those patterns with the Unified Modeling Language (UML). In addition it will also provide an overview of how the user interface architecture affects detailed UI design activities.

W40 - 3:30p-4:30p

Usage-Centered Town Meeting

Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood, Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd. (moderators)

An open forum to wrap-up the conference with the audience center-stage. This is a chance for everybody to participate in raising the questions, exploring the potentials, and defining the directions. Where to now? What happens next? What are the challenges and prospects? How do we proceed from here?

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