User Driven Design
This activity promotes a new concept in software design, focused on the end-user. It injects activities and artifacts into the development process to ensure that the end product is satisfactory from the user's point of view.
User driven design means that development work starts with the customer's needs and user scenarios. The objective is to provide the end-user with a perfected experience during the complete technology life-cycle. This outlook starts in the early phases (advertizing and pre-sale, licensing, ordering and distribution) moves to the major usage-centered phase (packaging, installation and configuration, documentation, leaning to use, general use, support and updates), and on to the final phases (post-sales follow-up and disposal).
Among other techniques, we leverage the methodology of story-based design, created in Lotus. Here, scenarios are enhanced by detailed stories that describe specific characters in specific situation. These stories contain the motivation, goals, and values that are relevant to the design of any artifact.
In some projects we initiated and led the creation of usage scenarios in the early phases, to ensure that issues addressed by the technology are included in the requirements and that the end-result is properly exposed to the user.
We also promoted discussions with customers, and teams that are exposed to customers, to better understand their needs. These were vital in promoting user driven design.