Some time ago I've created a planet of all design, usability and accessibility blogs at Sun. That makes it easy to check and subscribe what's going on in this area. Now it was a snap to add Oracle's Usable Apps and Luke Kowalski's Blog as well.

Sun & Oracle User Experience Design

enjoy
Matthias

Some time ago I attended the User Research Friday in San Francisco. For short, research is a very important early step of user experience design work. You need to know and understand the world of the users. Otherwise don't expect to design and develop a system that is of any use to them. Usability might be good, but it does not matter if it's not useful at all... [Well, I do not dive deeper into this discussion, otherwise I have to become philosophic.]

For Sun VDI 3 we conducted a few customer meetings that turned out to be very important to gain an understanding of the context of desktop virtualization. Note that this are not focus groups, or scripted Q&A sessions. They are open informal discussions on the current situations on site. I remember the system administrators of a scientific research lab with several visiting PhD students a year. Each of them needed a PC...  Another one was admin at an online store selling lots of toys in the Christmas season. Their call center is staffed with many 'agents'. During change of shifts it is really the critical point to keep queues short on the phone lines.

All this leads to certain questions on our side, e.g. How is a user assigned to a virtual machine? Does it belong to her personally? Or is it reused when the next employee logs in? How long does it take to recycle a virtual machine? What are the general pool policies?  etc.
In order to come up with reasonable answers it is important that you listen to your users. But do not simply build what they say. They are experts in their domain. You are the system designer and have to create a system that fits the context(s), solves a problem, and is easy (enough) to use. Hence - the goal is to build what the user needs.

>> VDI UX Story: Part 1: Concept Workshops || Part 3: Power of the Web

Hi, the User Experience Forum on the social networking platform Xing is an active community of usability and design professionals. During the recent 4 years the group grew to more than 2.500 members. If you like to join us sign up here.

1. Keep it simple.
2. But not simpler.
3. Keep scalability in mind.
4. End users are not dumb.
5. Sysadmins are human beings, too.

Hi there,

this blog will be revived because I have decided to join Sun's Desktop Virtualization team in Hamburg. As an User Experience Architect I will collect user requirements in this area and design a system for companies who want to replace their PCs with thin clients -- like eg. Sun Ray -- and use the computational power of the server room. You can argue that the desktop is virtual anyway - at least I like to argue that way. The desktop is a collection of metaphors, more or less consistent since the 1980s. To that extent the current development should be better called "remote desktop" -- but sooner or later both "remote" and "virtual" will become obsolete concepts for the end user.

Until then, best
Matthias

The User Experience Forum's newsletter for November is Highway 101.

Technorati Tags: userexperience

Requirements-Engineering im Spannungsfeld von Individual- und Produktsoftware in i-com (3)2005 by Petra Kowallik, Friedrich Strauß and Matthias Müller-Prove

Summary. This article summarizes the results of the “Requirements engineering in the context of customer software and standard software” workshop at Mensch und Computer 2004. During the workshop, we discussed the usefulness of several process models, methods and documentation techniques with respect to software development. Our goal was to identify the limitation as well as the rational behind certain methods or processes. These data can help to determine the best techniques for specific areas of standard and customer software development. This article provides valuable information to the practitioner that is usually not contained in textbooks and academic papers.
Zusammenfassung. Dieser Artikel fasst die Ergebnisse eines gleichnamigen Workshops auf der Mensch und Computer 2004 zusammen. Im Workshop wurde die unterschiedliche Anwendung von Vorgehensmodellen, Methoden und Dokumentationstechniken in Abhängigkeit von der zu erstellenden Software analysiert. Ziel war dabei die Besonderheiten und Restriktionen in der jeweiligen Nutzung z. B. einer Methode, eines Vorgehens oder einer Dokumentationstechnik zu identifizieren. Diese Ergebnisse ermöglichen es, den sinnvollen Einsatz von Methoden für bestimmte Einsatzfelder, wie die Spezifikation von Individualsoftware, genauer abschätzen zu können. Dieser Artikel stellt eine für den Praktiker hilfreiche Ergänzung zu den zumeist möglichst allgemeingültig gehaltenen Beschreibungen in Lehrbüchern und wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten dar.

User Experience und Requirements-Engineering für Software-Projekte