We consume and still we desire more. More devices, more apps, more data, more bandwidth, more connectivity. The more we have, the more we want …. We assume that to be true – those of us who work in the software industry. But is that true? To understand what is really required of our...

Today, we have more choices than ever for software products. The competition for our time and attention is fierce, and we tend to invest in only the products that we love. But product love can be elusive. User expectations have been recalibrated by the likes of Gmail, Facebook, and Instagram, yet many of the applications we build fall well short of these lovable experiences. Join Todd Olson in this keynote as he explores what it takes to create products your users love, where the end goal is not the minimum viable product, but the minimum lovable product. Creating and lovable product isn’t the responsibility of only the product owner or product manager, but the entire team. It starts with user empathy as the point of departure, followed by deep exploration into motivation, goals, and behaviors, toward the destination of products that anticipate and fulfill unarticulated needs.

When Isabel Evans learned to drive a car, she also learned how to check, clean, and change spark plugs, mend the fan belt with a stocking, and indicate speed and direction changes with arm and hand signals. Now, we don’t expect to have to do any of those things; we just drive the car. That’s how test tools and automation could be. Just drive and concentrate on the journey of delivering software continuously—concentrate on engineering the solutions, not on the automation. To be effective engineers, we need the support of a powerful toolset that we understand. Is that what we have? Or do we still have shelfware sitting around expensively doing nothing, because we don’t know how to "clean the spark plugs"? Can we remove the difficulties and make using test automation a better experience, just like driving a car?

We consume and still we desire more—more devices, more apps, more data, more bandwidth, more connectivity. The more we have, the more we want. We assume that to be true—those of us who work in the software industry. But is that true? To understand what is really required of our products, we need to design and test a pyramid of interlocking quality attributes that, together, make for an optimum experience. Isabel Evans discusses why and how we can evaluate UX and what is takes to deliver better UX to our customers. Isabel looks at the needs of the individual software user in conjunction with pressures from the commercial imperatives from the business and external forces from government, the environment, and the needs of society. To test the UX and thus deliver a good experience, we first need to understand the humans who use our products and match their needs and desires to the software’s user experience.