Introduction to Usability Engineering

1. Introduction to Usability Engineering Project, Team Roles/Skills

2. Announcements • Upcoming due dates/events: See schedule.

3. Project • Project: • Upcoming due dates. • Project ideas: Who has one? • Discussion • Choosing team members by skill: • Leadership/organization/coordination skillsUser skillsVisual “eye” Writing skills

4. Project Roles/Skills • The team: • Risk management: responsibility is yours. • Honoring your commitments. • Communicating with your team members when things aren’t going well. • Continuous process improvement. • What’s not working (email’d communications? scheduling? lack of lead time?)

5. Project Roles/Skills (cont.) • The lead: • Special responsibilities: • Keep everything organized/coordinated. • Lead in process improvement. • The buck stops here! • (But then you can delegate.) • Leadership skills a must! • It helps if the lead really cares (passion/ownership feeling) about the project.

6. Project Roles/Skills (cont.) • The “User” person • Special responsibilities: Watch out for the user’s interests at all times! • This means deeply understanding what the user’s interests actually are. • (Everyone should be doing this, but your responsibility is to make sure this happens!) • A talent for empathy. • Good listener, reads subtle cues well (eg, body language, hesitations in speech, ...)

7. Project Roles/Skills (cont.) • The “Visual” person • Special responsibilities: Make sure the interface “looks good”. • A visual talent for what looks nice. • eg: Do your written documents somehow look nicer than other people’s? • eg: Do you like some kinds of art?

8. Project Roles/Skills (cont.) • The “Writing/Presentations” person • Special responsibilities: Make sure the written assignments and presentations are done clearly, hang together logically to make the case, etc. • Do you like to write/speak? • eg: Do you get good grades in writing classes? • eg: Do you enjoy debating? • eg: Do you communicate well (in whatever your native language is)?

9. Project Roles/Skills (cont.) • The above are “special responsibilities”, not “sole responsibilities” • Everyone does everything! • But the special roles make sure that the important attributes are always being watched for.

10. Activity • Skills inventory activity here.