P&P Summit Day Two: Agile Presentation Layer Design
The next talk was given by Andrew Flick on user experience. He starts with an example of the three mile island catastrophe. The whole thing boiled down to a poor user experience and design of the user interface (he had a picture of the design of the control center of the facility).
He talked about the Impedance Match, or being on the same page with what you are working with. Impedance Match in Software is difficult because the communication is pretty much one way. In order to make it easier to deal with software should have standard layouts and patterns for consistent operations. I.e., make sure the Next, Back and Cancel buttons are always in the same order on every screen.
- Corporate Standards
- Usability Studies
- Using an Agile approach allows user requests to be handled easily.
These are things that help keep Impedance MisMatch down for using software.
There is a strategy to developing UIs. You have to balance User , Customer, Corporate and Technology goals. All of these goals need to be validated against the stakeholders of the application.
The next step is to define scope. The scope includes user personas, user stories, and input and validation from Real Users. You should target your intermediate user, then provide advanced features and helpful features for the beginner and advanced users.
The next step is the interaction layer. Using the user stories you can move on to choosing conceptual models, set design philosophies, error interaction modeling and developing use cases. Feedback from the user and actual interaction testing is key. This will provide you a way to design how the UI will flow, report errors and what it needs to do.
The next step is arrangement of the UI. This includes what components you select to display your data and gather input from your user. Keep a simplistic design and what the user expected. Don’t use a menu when the user would expect a tree view. Again, you should do usability testing.
The Surface layer is the next step. This is where the graphics designer role comes into play. Things like color palette and typeface matters. Visual clues to accent key areas and guide users should be thought of at this time. Once again, use usability testing to ensure the surface is actually appealing to the user and guiding them to the appropriate actions.
Using the different steps Andrew then mapped them to an agile process. The steps are easily comparable in agile terms since they include iterations, constant communication/feedback and offer places for refactoring.
This talk was interesting and not something I normally get involved with since I’m most often in the middle tier.