Introduction to Usability Engineering Project, Team Roles/Skills

Announcements Upcoming due dates/events: See schedule. widgets are for talking about most of these points.

Project Project: Project ideas: Who has one? Upcoming due dates. Project ideas: Who has one? Discussion Choosing team members by skill: Leadership/organization/coordination skills User skills Visual “eye” Writing skills

Project Roles/Skills The team: Risk management: responsibility is yours. Honoring your commitments. Communicating with your team members when things aren’t going well. Continuous process improvement. What’s not working (email’d communications? scheduling? lack of lead time?)

Project Roles/Skills (cont.) The lead: Special responsibilities: Keep everything organized/coordinated. Lead in process improvement. The buck stops here! (But then you can delegate.) Leadership skills a must! It helps if the lead really cares (passion/ownership feeling) about the project.

Project Roles/Skills (cont.) The “User” person Special responsibilities: Watch out for the user’s interests at all times! This means deeply understanding what the user’s interests actually are. (Everyone should be doing this, but your responsibility is to make sure this happens!) A talent for empathy. Good listener, reads subtle cues well (eg, body language, hesitations in speech, ...)

Project Roles/Skills (cont.) The “Visual” person Special responsibilities: Make sure the interface “looks good”. A visual talent for what looks nice. eg: Do your written documents somehow look nicer than other people’s? eg: Do you like some kinds of art?

Project Roles/Skills (cont.) The “Writing/Presentations” person Special responsibilities: Make sure the written assignments and presentations are done clearly, hang together logically to make the case, etc. Do you like to write/speak? eg: Do you get good grades in writing classes? eg: Do you enjoy debating? eg: Do you communicate well (in whatever your native language is)?

Project Roles/Skills (cont.) The above are “special responsibilities”, not “sole responsibilities” Everyone does everything! But the special roles make sure that the important attributes are always being watched for.

Activity Skills inventory activity here.