Better Software West 2017 - User Experience (UX)
Monday, June 5
Great Product Design with User Story Mapping
Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model that helps the people who create it envision a customer’s experience with the product. Story maps are a core practice within a design process focused on understanding and building empathy with customers and users, and then identifying and testing solutions to improve the customer’s experience with your product or services. Jeff Patton says that design process and story mapping can help you identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Learn how to map your customer and user...
Tuesday, June 6
Improve the Mobile User Experience (UX): Keep Your Users Coming Back
Many enterprises are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of mobile and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) are of increased importance, especially with SaaS-based business models where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat. This is intensified with mobile users who can download another app and try it for free. So you've got about thirty seconds for your users to understand how to use your app and get value. How do you do that? With a UX that...
Wednesday, June 7
Shave Mobile Development Time and Cost with Xamarin
By shaving time and cost to build and maintain your app by half, Xamarin—a free, open source framework offered by Microsoft—can revolutionize your mobile application development. Most app development approaches result in building the app twice—once for iOS and once for Android—or producing a sluggish app that has an inconsistent HTML-driven user interface. Xamarin lets you write C# code that’s compiled for each operating system to leverage each platform’s native UI, API access, and performance. Create an app that feels and performs like it was custom-built for that device, while sharing 90...
Improving Profitability through Accessibility
Michael Durrant has found that paying attention to basic usability and accessibility guidelines can make millions of extra dollars for his company. He describes his uphill journey to improve accessibility and usability for users purchasing car insurance through their website. Michael shares many factors to consider and barriers to overcome—from those who thought it wouldn’t make much difference to their customers, to those who pointed out that it had been tried before and not made any money, to those who didn’t have knowledge of or even agree with some of the basic principles of usability...
Drive Product Improvements with Telemetry
Do you want to know how real users are interacting with your product? Do you want to know which features they don’t use? Would you like to understand how your product works internally under real operational conditions? Then you need telemetry—the instrumentation of your product to record this information and transmit it back to you for analysis. Windows 10 implemented this capability. Today, there are more than 450 million devices running Windows 10 providing constant feedback on its operation. Ken Johnston says Microsoft learned a lot about what they did right for that launch—and what...