As more organizations adopt agile development methods, folks who practice the various disciplines related to user-centered design are forced to adapt. At the 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo on June 14, we heard one such story of adaptation from Christina Wood and Craig Miller, from the usability team at the local office of NCR. Christina and…
At last week’s 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo, Declan Whelan of Whelan & Associates talked about how to fit user experience/design/usability into an agile development process. I’ve had the pleasure of working as a UX designer with Declan on an extreme programming (XP) project and can vouch for his ideas: thanks to his leadership, that project…
I have a love/hate relationship with usability testing. I love the feedback it generates, but I hate the administrative make-busy work that surrounds it, especially when a test takes on a life of its own and becomes <shudder> an Event. When that happens, teams begin treating usability as an end in itself instead of as…
Despite a wide-ranging interest in personas (aka user profiles) by web and software designers, concrete examples of actual personas are surprisingly hard to find. So I’m happy to contribute an example here, from a chapter I wrote in the book User-Centered Design Stories. Click the thumbnails below for full-sized images, or download a printable PDF….
In a few days, the UPA 2007 conference will kick off in Austin, Texas. It’s here that many people will get their first glimpse of User-Centered Design Stories: Real-World UCD Case Studies, a new book by Carol Righi and Janice James. Carol and Janice have assembled an impressive collection of real-world case studies from 22…
Am I in an alternate universe here? Twice in one month, I find myself actually excited by new Microsoft products. At MIX07, I watched from the audience as Silverlight was announced; today, I wake up to the news that Microsoft is launching a 30-inch touchscreen table with a gestural interface. This new product, called Surface,…
Several years ago, I discovered East Japanese Restaurant in Milford, Connecticut while visiting a nearby client. This discovery had quite an unexpected impact on me: not only was I shocked to find that East served the best sushi I had ever tasted (and it still holds that distinction today), it also served as a textbook…