Annotation Great technology alone is rarely sufficient today to ensure a products success. At Microsoft, scenario-focused engineering is a customer-centric, iterative approach used to design and deliver the deeper experiences and emotional engagement customers demand in new products. In this book, youll discover the proven practices and lessons learned from real-world implementations of this approach, including:Why design matters: Understand a competitive landscape where customers are no longer satisfied by products that are merely useful, but respond instead to products they crave using. What it means to be customer focused: Recognize that you are not the customer, understand customers can have difficulty articulating what they want, and apply techniques that uncover their unspoken needs. How to iterate effectively: Implement a development system that is flexible enough to respond to early and continuous feedback, and enables experimentation with multiple ideas and feedback loops simultaneously. How to bridge the culture gap: In an engineering environment traditionally rooted in strong analytics, the ideas and practices for scenario-focused engineering may not be intuitive. Learn how to change team mindset from deciding what a product, service, or device will do, to discovering what customers actually want and what will work for them in real-life scenarios. Connections with Lean and Agile approaches: See the connections, gaps, and overlaps among the Lean, Agile, and Scenario-Focused Engineering methodologies, and achieve a more holistic view of software development.

Usability engineering is about designing products that are easy to use. This text provides an introduction to human computer interaction principles, and how to apply them in ways that make software and hardware more effective and easier to use.

Blend the art of innovation with the rigor of engineering Great technology alone is rarely sufficient to ensure a product’s success. Scenario-Focused Engineering is a customer-centric, iterative approach used to design and deliver the seamless experiences and emotional engagement customers demand in new products. In this book, you’ll discover the proven practices and lessons learned from real-world implementations of this approach, including why delight matters, what it means to be customer-focused, and how to iterate effectively using the Fast Feedback Cycle. In an engineering environment traditionally rooted in strong analytics, the ideas and practices for Scenario-Focused Engineering may seem counter-intuitive. Learn how to change your team’s mindset from deciding what a product, service, or device will do and solving technical problems to discovering and building what customers actually want. Improve the methods and mindsets you use to: Select a target customer to maximize carryover Discover your customer’s unarticulated needs Use storytelling to align your team and partners Mitigate tunnel vision to generate more innovative ideas Use experimentation to fail fast and learn Solicit early and ongoing feedback Iterate using a funnel-shaped approach Manage your projects around end-to-end experiences Build a team culture that puts the customer first

John Carroll shows how a pervasive but underused element of design practice, the scenario, can transform information systems design. Difficult to learn and awkward to use, today's information systems often change our activities in ways that we do not need or want. The problem lies in the software development process. In this book John Carroll shows how a pervasive but underused element of design practice, the scenario, can transform information systems design. Traditional textbook approaches manage the complexity of the design process via abstraction, treating design problems as if they were composites of puzzles. Scenario-based design uses concretization. A scenario is a concrete story about use. For example: "A person turned on a computer; the screen displayed a button labeled Start; the person used the mouse to select the button." Scenarios are a vocabulary for coordinating the central tasks of system development—understanding people's needs, envisioning new activities and technologies, designing effective systems and software, and drawing general lessons from systems as they are developed and used. Instead of designing software by listing requirements, functions, and code modules, the designer focuses first on the activities that need to be supported and then allows descriptions of those activities to drive everything else. In addition to a comprehensive discussion of the principles of scenario-based design, the book includes in-depth examples of its application.

This volume is based on a workshop sponsored by the editor at IBM, and includes contributions from an international group of researchers in the field of human computer interaction.

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You’ll learn the principles and practices that enable Google engineers to make systems more scalable, reliable, and efficient—lessons directly applicable to your organization. This book is divided into four sections: Introduction—Learn what site reliability engineering is and why it differs from conventional IT industry practices Principles—Examine the patterns, behaviors, and areas of concern that influence the work of a site reliability engineer (SRE) Practices—Understand the theory and practice of an SRE’s day-to-day work: building and operating large distributed computing systems Management—Explore Google's best practices for training, communication, and meetings that your organization can use