Agile processes and lightweight methods are increasingly popular but share with their ponderous predecessors an inattention to usability and user interface design. Usage-centered design is a proven industrial-strength process for designing highly usable and innovative solutions to interaction-intensive problems. It has been applied with marked success to projects ranging from automation programming tools to classroom information systems to e-commerce Web sites. Through alternating lectures, applied exercises, and discussions, this tutorial introduces a streamlined process for quickly and efficiently designing improved user interfaces supported by robust internal software. Essential use cases—a simplified, generalized, and abstract improvement on conventional use cases—are used to model tasks and to guide the design of user interfaces that effectively support the real needs of users. Through actual application to a compressed but representative case study problem, participants will learn, how to employ ordinary index cards and accelerated modeling sessions to quickly understand and prioritize user roles and user tasks and to organize the needed user interface contents. The emphasis will be on modeling techniques that yield the greatest payoff from the least effort in design, techniques that are well-suited to producing world-class designs through iterative, time-boxed development within compressed release cycles. Attendee Background: Some experience with use cases and familiarity with the basic concepts and techniques of object-orientation are assumed. Understanding of the basic principles of usability and user interface design would be helpful but is not mandatory. Presenters: Larry Constantine is Adjunct Professor of Computing Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, and Director of Research and Development for Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd., the international design and consulting firm he co-founded. A pioneer of modern software engineering practice and a recognized authority on the human side of software, he is the co-inventor of essential use cases and usage-centered design. He has conducted hundreds of seminars and tutorials in nineteen countries and his publications include sixteen books and nearly 150 papers. Dr. James Noble is a lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and a Consulting Associate with Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd. He is the co-author of Small Memory Software: Patterns for Systems with Limited Memory (Addison-Wesley 2000), and numerous published papers on software design, user interface design, and design patterns. He has extensive lecturing and teaching experience, including tutorials at OOPSLA, TOOLS Pacific, and OzCHI.

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