Sunday, January 21, 2007
Full-Day Seminar, 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

Larry Constantine

Usage-Centered Application Design: An Intensive Introduction

Larry Constantine, Constantine & Lockwood

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users' goals and activities. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don't, every little design decision becomes a struggle.

To help designers deliver software and web apps that successfully satisfy their users' needs, we turned to Larry Constantine, author of the landmark book, Software for Use, to share his proven techniques in a full-day tutorial at the UIE Web App Summit.

At UIE, we've admired Larry Constantine for more than 15 years. Larry is a recognized leader in design methodology and product usability. With Lucy Lockwood, he developed Usage-Centered Design, a model-driven process with a proven track record for delivering software and web applications that fit the genuine needs of users.

In this tutorial, Larry will show you how the key to better application designs is to base them directly and systematically on a sound understanding of your users, their activities, and their goals. This intensive hands-on seminar introduces Usage-Centered Design, a systematic interaction design process guided by simple but powerful models of users, activities, and user interface contents. By focusing on the users' activities, Larry will show you how to quickly understand the essence of user needs and derive innovative designs that better support those needs.

This seminar for designers, developers, and their managers emphasizes streamlined modeling techniques for quickly and effectively capturing, organizing, and validating information and insight about users and their needs. Using low-tech tools including index cards, sticky notes, and simplified schematics, you will have the opportunity for hands-on application and skill building with a realistic applied design problem.

In this tutorial, Larry will share with you:

  • An intensive introduction to a model-driven design process.
  • Techniques for developing core models and ways to understand users and user activity through essential models.
  • How to create user roles, personas, tasks scenarios, and prototypes.
  • How to build an activity-centered interface architecture.

You will come way from this tutorial with a solid understanding of the usage-centered design process and new techniques that you can put into immediate practice in your own work.