Why did my last product flop? Why aren’t users flocking to it like we thought they would? How do I make something better next time? How do I get buy in for my next great idea?

Fear not! In this session, we will discuss how anything from politics, to culture, to variance of internet speed around the world can affect how your product is received. Learn how to avoid falling into the trap of thinking you are the average user in your audience...and take the pressure off yourself with some good ol' DIY user tests, interviews, observation, surveys and a few other tried and true methods.

Learn whether your business and creative goals might be in direct conflict with a user’s goals and how to decrease the risk of making a bad experience. You will walk away feeling more confident in your business, design, and development decisions regardless of budget size.

Do you sometimes find yourself frustrated at the sheer audacity of designers making completely design-centric decisions, throwing all sorts of documentation and rocks over the fence, all the while completely oblivious to just how many holes they're making in your windows? Do you feel that they might as well be speaking in Lorem Ipsum to you? When you say something to them, are they just getting an error 404 message back?

It doesn’t have to be that way! In this talk, you will learn about the fundamental differences in the perspectives of designers and developers and how we might tap into those differences to strengthen the way we work together. You will learn techniques and exactly what to say to take steps towards breaking down silos and becoming involved in the design process while also involving designers in the development process. As a result, you will open the floor up to educating each other and avoiding resentment by working close together in interdisciplinary teams with a unified end goal in mind, finishing on time and on budget (living the dream!).

A little thought and exploration of the needs of people who will use a product can do a lot to create an interface design that actually works for people! It can also improve relationships between engineering and management as both become more focused on the success of the product for the people who will be using it.

Imagine that you are asked to create a simple keypad interface. Why can’t you just implement what others have done before? How can you go about assuring that YOUR design works well, has a reduced error rate, and is as easy to use as possible?

Rather than trying to memorize a list of hundreds of best practices for software design, apply five basic principles that result in software that is innovative and usable.

1. It's not about you
2. It Depends
3. Simple is good: but it's not simple
4. Influence not control
5. Practice creates change

User Experience (UX) focuses on people and their interactions with the world. The UX Design process links research to the creation of the design and can be used to validate use cases and user requirements that are part of Agile development processes.

This workshop will give you an introduction to the research with people who will use a product. You will learn how it can be used to assess the efficiency, effectiveness, learnability, and error reduction of alternative designs.

Completing a sample project will allow you to experience some of the steps in the user centered design of a software product. You will use data to: • Understand who will use the product through the creation of a persona • Create and test design prototypes, and • Implement what has been learned in a draft of the final design.