Victoria Bellotti||Nicolas Ducheneaut||Mark Howard||Ian Smith
PARC||PARC||PARC||PARC
Seven Slides and a Fight: How Extreme Programming improved our user-centered design process, but not our social skills
October 4, 2002
The subject of this talk is the recent experiences of a small
team of engineers and fieldworkers at PARC of moving from a more
conventional style of user-centered iterative design and prototyping
to extreme programming (XP) as a means to integrate ethnographic
fieldwork and feedback from using prototypes with engineering
and design. We specifically focus on the different perspectives
we all have, as user or customer representatives, designers and
engineers, of the pro's and con's of XP for user-centered design.
Normally this causes a fight about a lot of contentious issues
that we have encountered, which we will be happy to share with
you.
Victoria
Bellotti is a Senior Member of Research Staff in the
Computer Science Lab at PARC. She studies current and prospective
technology users trying to understand their work-practice, their
problems and their requirements for future technology. She also
works on analyzing existing or proposed technology design for
utility and usability and on finding ways to improve designs
with user-centered innovations. Victoria studied psychology,
ergonomics and HCI at London University in the UK. After that
she worked at Xerox's Cambridge Research Lab (EuroPARC) for five
years. She came to the USA in 1994 to work in Apple's Advanced
Technology Group for three years before moving back to Xerox
to work at PARC in Palo Alto. Her research interests include
Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Computer Mediated Communication
and Ubiquitous Computing.
Nicolas
Ducheneaut is a research associate in the Computer Science
Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and a Ph.D.
candidate at the School of Information Management and Systems
(SIMS), University of California, Berkeley; his research interests
include computer-supported cooperative work, computer-mediated
communication, and the social impacts of information technologies
in organizations.
Mark Howard came to the
United States from London, England where he gained an MS in Computer
Science at University College London. He is now a member of the
research staff at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center. His primary
role is software engineer on projects concerned with developing
experimental software systems.
Ian Smith
is a member of the research staff at PARC Incorporated. His work
focuses on the integration of software development tools and
practices with ethnographic techniques in user interface development.
He has published numerous papers in conferences such as the ACM
symposium on user interface software, ACM conference on computer
supported cooperative work, and the ACM conference on human computer
interaction. He currently has eleven United States patents pending.
In 1998, he was granted a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the
Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. He lives
in San Francisco, California with his wife, Valerie.