Collaboration-Based Usability Training for Developers

Applying user-centered design methodology, we developed a usability training workshop for beginning developers which has remarkable impact on participants ’ attitudes towards the collaboration with nontechnical professions. Mainly through a simulation game we let course participants experience typical pitfalls of and opportunities for collaboration with non-technical professions in the development team, with the primary focus on User Interface Designers. Rather than teaching abstract high-level usability principles we induce learning by insight and social forms of learning. 1 The Challenge: What & How to Teach Developers? Computer science curriculum studies are still slow to embrace user-centered development methods (Kaasinen & Clarke 1998). Consequently, much of the usability training and education for developers is left to corporate training organizations. In their specific context, corporate instructional designers need to address a set of typical problems in order to create effective usability training for developers. Because tasks related to usability are not the professional focus of a developer, the allotment of time and resources for training is limited. As usability and interaction design experts, we face the problem that boiling down our expertise to a 2-day course runs the danger of resulting in commonplac

Hands-on actionable mashups

This paper describes how to involve end users without expertise in programming in a session where they will be asked to accomplish some tasks according to a new paradigm for actionable mashups. The goal will be to understand what the advantages of this new paradigm are with respect to traditional methods for mashup composition and information exploration