Susan Wiingaard, Independent consultant

Susan Wiingaard is an independent consultant with experience as Usability Specialist from European work systems for people in the ERP business. Susan has worked with projects of various sizes and focus and in different organizational settings both in and outside development teams. Her formal education is a MA degree within linguistics, IT, information design and usability from Denmark. Susan has had special focus on formalizing user data so that they can be integrated practically and smoothly in the development process.

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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