Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Frazier Berek

Frazier Berek — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:53:54 GMT

An off the wall approach comes from SERENA Software. SERENA Software sells an expensive, but comprehensive web based integrated tool set that:
 Support collaborative development team process with IA integration
 Visually capture requirements as wireframes and extend them into high-fidelity prototypes that simulate the final application
 Supports Agile, lean business management and other common methodologies
 Manage the product requirements, business process, development life cycle, defects, software configuration & releases
 Uses a Project and portfolio tool to track project plans, tasks, resources, time tables and schedules

Frazier Berek — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:14:32 GMT

When you use a snapshot personal to personalize the primary user, but also include the characteristics from Lucy Lockwood ’s user profile, you also display the primary users goals, tech skills, current product usage and so on.

See Lucy’s article: Users, Roles, and Personas
www.foruse.com/articles/rolespersonas.htm

Description: User role models are compared in detail with the popular user modeling technique of personas. User roles offer a more compact, more focused means of capturing and exploring those aspects of users most relevant to interaction design. The advantages and limitations of the approaches are considered and a combined strategy is described.

Frazier Berek — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:39:21 GMT

When I was at Scient, a Fortune 100 customer proposed building their own version of Progressive insurance and their own comprehensive medical site for their employees to access within their benefit program. A top VP was supporting the idea and the project was supposed to have a big budget, we did not want to get sued for building an expensive application that no one would want.

We approached the lateral business owner/SME expert about testing the idea. .We conducted a Collaborative Usability Inspection (Lucy Lockwood) using a prototype in front of their business owner. From within their benefits application, the inspection had 2 representative users each walking through high-level goals of trying to get insurance for a teenage son and looking up medical information after being diagnosed with diabetes.

The business owner was initially frustrated when the users said that they would not look for that information within the benefits program. She clearly saw that the product idea was flawed and changed the model to linking to those sites. Since the tech bubble was about to burst, the idea of the next project was put on hold anyway.

Later, the business owner recognized the value of the Collaborative Usability Inspection concept, bought the book and took the class. She had been frustrated with getting management to listen to her and wanted to use the inspection to test her ideas.