Portsmouth, ForUSE, Jeff Patton

Arrived in Boston last night at about 9.30 and made our way somewhat tortuously to the Hotel in Portsmouth from Boston Airport via running for a coach and then catching a cab from the 'Stoppango' to the Hotel where the conference is to be held. Why are hotels all so much the same? This one feels just slightly tired and in need of a facelift. But basically very comfortable... mustn't grumble and all that.

Woke up this morning at 'Sparrow's Fart' which was about 5 am... then again at six because the assholes in the room before me left the alarm set for that time, then again all morning till I got up. Spent the day exploring portsmouth (see gallery below).

Portsmouth Pictures

The first of the reception gatherings was held in the evening where I met a few people. One of which was Helmut Windl who works for Siemens and is an associate of Constantine & Lockwood who put this conference on. He's been working toward integrating Performance Centred Design and Usage Centred Design. Some of what he's worked toward is a making workflow obvious to the end user through the interface (basic example would be representing the steps in a linear process). He's extended this to forming a hybrid between an object oriented use case and a user task flow to aid in the development process. He also talked about prioritising features against criterias of frequency of use, overall importance (to tasks), and business importance. I was still jet-lagged a bit, so I couldn't really get the most out of what we were discussing. He had more to say. It didn't stick in my head so well.

Helmut did however, pull Jeff Patton over to talk to Lorna Ledden, Andy Scotland and I about what we're here to glean - how to integrate User/Usage Centred Design with agile processes such as XP and Scrum. Jeff has had a lot of experience with this very thing. The first thing he talked about was measuring risk on a project to determine how much design needs to be done before coding should begin. Risk assessment is done through measuring potential revenue loss versus amount of resources that will be building a given product (i.e. potential money lost on final product vs money spent to build it). Risk becomes a function of design lead time.

We also talked about our past experiences with different processes from UCD to XP to SCRUM which was useful in that he had some insights for us about involving all team members but at the right level and time. I think that this confirmed what we knew from experience but still don't have a handle on the fix yet. How do we get that balance right? Jeff suggested he knew of some techniques to get it right, but wasn't able to demonstrate at the time. Might have some supporting info later.