Internet User Experience 2009

Audience

This course is relevant for user experience professionals, business analysts, and project managers.

Outline

This short course teaches skills in:

• Using customer stories as input to scenario based design.
• Using scenario based design as a method for resolving conflicts between business interests, end-users goals, and technology constraints.
• Diagram interaction patterns from usage scenarios.
• Abstracting and write use cases.
• Illustrating use cases with User Interface design concepts to present storyboards for end-user and client feedback and as hand-offs to developers.
• Re-using scenarios and use cases to define system, user acceptance and usability tests.

Instructor

Jan Moorman has over fifteen years experience innovating and specifying user-centered software designs. Her experience spans business domains, delivery platforms, teams and process approaches. She finds the design challenges to be as interesting and compelling a problem as the individual software projects themselves. With a passion for improving user experiences and usability she has a keen interest in improving the experience of creating software and the usability of design related artifacts.

She has taught working with use case to consultants while at Trilogy, participated in building the basic use case curriculum for Intuit and has given talks on to software professional organizations on performing root cause analysis of usability study findings to uncover software process deficiencies.

Her work synthesizes the published work from numerous experts in the field of use cases and scenario based design.

Audience

This workshop is designed for practitioners from all 3 areas (coding/programming, user experience, and marketing) who are interested in gaining a better understanding of all facets of optimization.

Tutorial Outline / Schedule

1. The Need for Optimization (8:30 - 9:00 a.m.)
2. Improving Performance, Part 1 (9:00 - 10:00 a.m.)
3. Demo: Performance Enhancements (10:00 - 10:15 a.m.)
4. Break (10:15 - 10:30 a.m.)
5. Improving Performance, Part 2 (10:30 - 11:30 a.m.)
6. Lunch (11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.)
7. Usability Optimizations (12:30 - 1:30 p.m.)
8. Activity: Optimizing Usability (1:30 - 2:00 p.m.)
9. Break (2:00 - 2:15 p.m.)
10. Accessibility Optimizations (2:15 - 3:15 p.m.)
11. Findability Optimizations (3:15 - 4:15 p.m.)
12. Review and Wrap-Up (4:15 - 4:30 p.m.)

Instructor

Jason is the president and founder of Usable Development, LLC, which focuses on user experience and web design consulting, development, and training.

He also serves as the Department Chair for the Internet Professional Program at Washtenaw Community College.

His background includes over 8 years of experience in the web industry, in roles such as Information Architect and Business Systems Analyst.

Introduction

Mobile design is much like other types of design (web, pc, etc.). Applications need to have solid use cases with a developed persona in mind. Interactions need to be consistent, predictable, discoverable and enjoyable. However, mobile design adds additional challenges on top, including users who are probably on the go, multitasking (not in the systems engineering sense, but possibly walking or driving), highly contextual, time limited, etc.

To be a good mobile interaction designer is to understand that designs must compete with the external environment and to therefore take into account cognitive principals that dictate what humans are able to enjoy. In most cases those who develop mobile applications are doing so for systems that already have interaction paradigms in place which adds the challenge of differentiating while at the same time being consistent.

This tutorial will teach participants the basic tenants of mobile design from beginning to end. Focus will be geared towards those aspects of design that are unique or critically important to the mobile space, including input mechanism, key set, action model, locus and attention and navigation. Participant may bring ideas for applications they are looking to develop (including use cases and personas) and the group can focus on the unique attributes that would make those apps compelling mobile designs.

Tutorial Outline

One part good idea plus one part Mobile Design will result in compelling applications. That is to say, this tutorial will be highly interactive depending on participants to bring ideas relating to their field and applying mobile interaction guidelines to create applications. Each section will begin with a topic summary, references to readings, examples and then move on to participant activities.

Morning activities will be smaller, focusing on individual topic areas. Afternoon activities will consist of designing mobile applications in groups (or individually if so inclined) to be reviewed and critiqued by the group.

Audience

This tutorial demonstrates how to design for the mobile environment. It assumes either basic competence in design (mobile or otherwise) OR frequent collaboration with designers inside your organization. Aside from providing resources and knowledge to further mobile design activities, this tutorial is designed to help communication with and among designers within a mobile framework.

Instructor

Michael Wood is a Team Lead for Motorola's Consumer Experience Design group. There he leads groups in projects designing mobile applications for social communication, media consumption and fun. Mike works with product management, software development, marketing and customer account teams to create and tell a specific story around a give product that unfolds to the user through compelling mobile user experiences.

Before joining Motorola Mike worked on Windows-based application design and usability and holds a Masters in Human Computer Interaction. Mike enjoys reading, plays guitar, loves to travel and is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer having served two years in Guatemala, Central America with his wife Ali.

In this talk Sheridan will explore the practices of the High-Tech Anthropologists® at Menlo Innovations' award-winning Menlo Software Factory and will provide the audience with very practical ideas to greatly improve their odds of creating a successful offering.

About the Speaker

As President of Menlo Innovations, Rich Sheridan, along with his three business partners, formed a company around the passions of building great software and great software teams. He has sponsored dramatic changes to existing teams using techniques from many sources, including Extreme Programming. He has focused on improving the culture, productivity and results of teams with which he works.

Rich has focused his attention and energy on the power of open and collaborative work spaces as originally practiced by Thomas Edison. Edison's lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey was the inspiration for the company name. The dramatic success of Menlo, during one of the hardest times for the information technology industry, captured the attention of Forbes magazine, where Rich appeared on the cover in May, 2003. He was named one of the top 100 emerging business leaders of the Metro-Detroit region by the Detroiter magazine, and was also recently named one of the nation's 50 most prolific project managers by PM Network magazine.