Diana Velasco, Design Anthropologist

Diana is an independent user experience professional based in Copenhagen, Denmark, who works for international companies and has a passion for taking part in creating innovative, usable and sophisticated experiences for people based on their unspoken needs. She is a user- and usage-centered researcher, process facilitator and concept maker.

Most recently, she is working as a project manager of own digital consumer product focusing on entrepreneurship, design management, vision & strategy. With a background in anthropology and communication and with work experiences from ERP-software systems, the Web industry and from consumer products she has defined and refined the role as a Design Anthropologist in different industries. She is a member of the Design Anthropology Group and of the local SIGCHI chapter.

Presentation: "Bridging Usability Specialists with Developers: The link to the developer world"

Track: Software Usability for software developers

Time: Wednesday 11:00 - 12:00

Location: Westminster Suite

Abstract:

Usability people gather information from the user community using techniques such as contextual design: following the users to seek out practices and context that figure strongly in usability. Usability folks then need to convey these insights to a design and coding community that understands classes and bits but which lacks both customer contact and the skills for analyzing human behavior.

Software developers, on the other hand, understand formalisms such as Use Cases, from which they can derive objects and mechanisms to drive software development, but they don't know how to use Use Cases to ferret out key usability concerns. In fact, these two skill sets complement each other well -and Diana, Susan, and Gertrud will offer their respective perspectives on how to combine these two worlds. With a small set of conventions, Use Cases make great tools for capturing many traditional usability concerns.

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