Customer Experience: The Future of Usability - Dec 3, Sydney

A number of usability industry luminaries, plus me, are speaking on an AIMIA panel entitled "Customer Experience: The Future of Usability" in Sydney on Dec 3. I plan to talk about emerging pressures on user-centred-design: faster design, design by everyone etc.

• How can user experience professionals support the design of great customer experiences by everyone, not just by user experience people?
• While user experience professionals continue to lobby for more time and resources, the time available for user experience design is actually shrinking.
• How can we adapt to the phenomenon of beta-ism: 'release first then refine the user experience later'?

https://www.aimia.com.au/i-cms?page=3559

All the speakers are really experienced with these issues, I'm looking forward to the discussion part at the end of the panel most.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2007
  Is "beta-ism" another word for "agile" ???

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2007
  Hi Sarah, Well I guess they CAN be the same thing. But agile may or may not involve actually releasing iterations for general use. I guess by beta-ism I mean the web practice of doing minimal trditional user-centred-design up-front, then releasing the product (in beta, or not)then refining the user experience through rapid iteration of the live service. Slideshare.net did this, for example. You can't do it for all products, and you can get caught in the trap of incrementalism (once yo've released it's hard to make a major change - viz Office 2007). But when you've got to get to market fast, and with modern frameworks making the coding part ever-easier, design is in danger of becoming the bottleneck. Yikes. Shane