Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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Although nearly everyone acknowledges the importance of user experience, usability often ends up pushed to the back of the queue. How then can we know whether what we are delivering makes sense and will work for our users? This presentation shows an approach to usability, focusing on activities in which users engage offers the potential for delivering dramatic improvements with much less effort.
The wider adoption of Agile software development has raised questions about how an approach that shuns up-front design and analysis can coexist with the emerging practice of user-centered design, which has a detailed user research and modeling phase before development begins. In this article Dave Churchville explores how the disciplines can be used together for an effective development process.
Introduced with the rollout of the Windows Presentation Foundation, the concept of Differentiated UX (Differentiated User Experience) was intended to help promote a new capability associated with this technology for delivering enhanced user experiences. Recently, Brian Noyes and Dax Pandhi provided a more concrete explanation of the term and described its relevance to UI designers and developers.
Many software project management and architecture approaches tend to parcel out work on a project in a way to create hierarchical layers. This helps simplify both developers’ work and management. However, the underlying information shielding among layers can potentially create a gap between developers and the software they are building, if their tasks are totally taken out of functional context.
James O. Coplien has recently argued that today’s industry is based on buzzwords and checklists. The use of some techniques and methodologies, TDD for instance, has become “a religious issue”. This prevents from inspecting possible tradeoffs and focusing on finding solutions that would be the most appropriate and the most cost-effective for a given project.
Can the bonding that takes place when a developer picks a story card off the task board and takes it over to her desk ever be replicated in a system? InfoQ delves into social informatics, and addresses the effects it has on the Agile way.
Incremental search as a means to find features and functions within applications may be an emerging UI design innovation. Apple and Microsoft have recently tried it with a lot of praise from the community. Are we experiencing a paradigm shift in application navigation? Are the days of traversing a maze of menus and remembering convoluted keyboard shortcuts numbered?
Design in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) world involves working with the user to understand the problem and come up with a user interface – typically on paper - of the entire system before turning it over, in Big Design Upfront (BDUF) manner, to the rest of the development team to build. So how can Robert Biddle claim that HCI has home-grown practices that are very similar to those of Agile?
Back in November we reported on the usage restrictions for the new UI design known as the Ribbon. Since then we have been able to catch up with Chris Bryant, a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, to answer some of the lingering questions.
