SoftwareGR

Lane Halley, Cooper

Open talk: February 24, 2009, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Registration-only workshop: February 25, 2009
Where: Work Play Space, 941 Wealthy Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506

This talk will be followed by a workshop on User Experience design. Seats are limited! Registration is now open. More info and registration.

Agile is very popular, and has produced successful products. However, even highly-functional Agile teams can fail because a successful product is more than just well-executed technology delivered on time. Many core Agile techniques (e.g. peer programming, integrated testing, refactoring) are focused on effective development. Often, Agile projects are staffed exclusively with people who write code. How does the Agile process best integrate the contributions of business stakeholders, and other team members? Even if there’s someone on the team who knows and represents the customer, what do you do when you have multiple customers? How do you know that your product will deliver a coherent user experience over time as it evolves? How do you balance feedback from team members and users so you can correctly prioritize and sequence user stories?

In this talk, Lane will draw on her experience with Agile teams to share how user experience design methods contribute to Agile projects and how UE activities can be coordinated with Agile development activities.

Speaker Bio

Lane Halley is a Principal Design Consultant with Cooper in San Francisco, CA. Her career spans the formative years of the interaction design profession. Prior to joining Cooper in 1997, Lane worked in marketing, training development, technical account management and product management roles at SSC, Microsoft, Mindscape and SenSage. While at Cooper, she has helped companies ranging from start-ups to large corporations create compelling design solutions for enterprise and consumer applications, websites and devices and is a popular teacher of CooperU courses. Lane believes that interaction design is a bridge between product management and development, and that user experience design informs and enhances Agile product development.