On large enterprise projects, the user acceptance test (UAT) is often envisioned to be a grand event where the users accept the software, money is paid, and the congratulations and...

Although usability and user experience may seem synonymous, they are separate and much different concepts. While usability is well defined in standards, UX has no agreed upon definition because it relates to a more nebulous attribute-user satisfaction. Both are, however, key ingredients for successful system deployment. Because they don’t know how to measure and evaluate UX, many teams ignore this important attribute until the end of development. Philip Lew discusses how to model both usability and UX by breaking each attribute down into measurable characteristics-learnability, user effectiveness, user efficiency, content quality, user errors, and more. Phil shows you how to derive measurements and metrics that your development and team can employ to benchmark, analyze, and improve both usability and UX.

Whose job is it to ensure that the user has a good experience with a new application? As agile processes are taught today, the user experience (UX) design practice is usually left out or at best described as an optional team role. However, the companies that build useful, usable, and desirable software know that UX is baked into the whole development process. Jeff Patton describes what user experience design is and isn’t, and how every person on the team has something to contribute. Hear concrete examples of how companies have adapted their UX practice to work well in an agile context and, along the way, discovered innovative UX practices that work better in agile contexts. Jeff explores pragmatic personas, guerrilla user research, design sketching, lightweight prototyping, and concept testing. Leave with valuable tips for adding UX practices and thinking to your agile process to help you get good user experience.