Laying The Foundation For User Interface Process Improvement

Dr. Susan L. Keenan

Friday, March 26, 1999
11 a.m.
Fuller Labs 311

More and more companies make advertising claims regarding the level of usability achieved in their software products. The growing need to compete with existing, usable software systems has forced many companies to view usability as an important attribute of overall software quality. When these companies turn to the relevant literature and reports of practitioner experiences for advice, they find many recommendations that focus on incorporating user-centered activities into the development process and on including trained personnel on the team. Although this guidance does enable companies to begin "doing usability", it is insufficient for organizations wishing to improve their user interface development process. Specifically, there is no systematic method for diagnosing weaknesses in a given user interface development process or for devising a strategy for incremental process improvement. In this talk, I will discuss the problem with current approaches to user interface development, what ideas we can "borrow" from software engineers, and how we can extend those ideas to develop a method for user interface process improvement.

Host

Micha Hofri

Colloquium Coordinator

Carolina Ruiz

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Last modified: Sep 27, 2006, 16:05 EDT