SD Best Practices India 2007: Day Two

The way Jason Beres sees it, the Three-Mile Island nuclear reactor disaster of nearly 30 years ago was, in part, a UI problem.

And UIs are something Beres, who is chief technical evangelist at Infragistics, understands. After all he's written the book (okay, a book or two and a bunch of articles) on the topic -- and that was the focus of his presentation at Dr. Dobb's SD Best Practices India 2007. Entitled "An Agile Approach to Building Great User Experiences," Beres' presentation examined the "user model" which focuses on building UIs based on what users wants. The "user model," in other words.

There are a couple of things particularly interesting about the user-model approach. One is that it requires you clearly identify who you user/client is before design and coding starts. Most importantly, it helps you identify potential conflicts early one. For instance, will the appliation be used by both a novice and a power user? If so, how do you cater to the needs of one and the demands of the other without alienating both?

The second intersting thing about the user model is that it is ideally suited to sync up with agile methodologies, particularly in terms of iteration and the like.

What I liked about Jason's presentation was that it became clear that Infragistics, the company he works for, eats its own agile dogfood. That is, not only does Infragistics enocurage its customers to adopt agile methodologies when using Infragistic tools, Infragistic uses agile methodologies to build those tools. All the way from techniques like user models to daily, 15-minute standup meetings, 30-day sprints, and other Scrum-like techniques.

Oh, and the Three-Mile Island stuff? Beres showed photos of control panels at the nuclear site that had important switches identified by beer-bottle caps adhered to the switch. Let's see, Budweiser is "turn on the airconditioner," Coors is "fire the reactor" or whatever. Not what you'd call intuitive, nor a great user experience.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:05 PM  Permalink