Usability

It’s usually the finer points of the user experience (UX) design that separate good-enough software from really-great software. For companies launching new products or adding new capabilities, how well they understand their users and their needs differentiates the wild successes from the dismal failures. This is user experience design, and doing it well in the past took experienced specialists and lots of time. But the world has changed. Jeff Patton describes how Lean UX turns product design into a team sport in which everyone participates. Learn how Lean UX thinking breaks what we thought were good design rules. In Lean UX design, it’s OK to guess. It's OK for developers to talk to users. It’s OK for bad artists to design user interfaces. And, it’s OK to demonstrate half-baked ideas. You’d think that if we break all these rules, good user experience couldn’t possibly result—but it does. Jeff shares examples of how all this rule breaking is supported by a culture of experimentation and learning—and that makes all the difference.

Testing wearable devices is fundamentally more complex than any other mobile device. Wearables become extensions of us, so testing should focus on the total user experience—the emotional, physical, and sensory reactions including the biases and mindset of the wearer. It involves testing in the real world of the wearer―when, where, and how the wearer and the device will function together. Using concepts from human-computer interaction design, Gerie Owen and Peter Varhol provide a framework for testing the “human experience” of wearables. Learn to develop personas by delving into the wearers’ personalities and characteristics to understand their expectations of the wearable. Then learn to create user value stories to test the ways in which the wearers will derive value from the wearable. Finally, learn the importance of human-experience testing as Gerie shares her personal story—a tale of two wearables and her 2011 Boston Marathon run.