"Some argue the big advances in our impact on design and usability will come from better methods. Some argue they will come from earlier involvement in the development process. The biggest impact, however, will come as more and more companies realize the benefits of user-centered design and embrace it. Eric offers a practical road map to get there."—Arnie Lund, Director of Design and Usability, Microsoft Corporation "This book is a great how-to manual for people who want to bring the benefits of improved usability to their companies. It's thorough yet still accessible for the smart businessperson. I've been working with user-centered design for almost 20 years and I found myself circling tips and tricks."—Harley Manning, Research Director, Forrester Research "This book should be required reading for all executive champions of change. It does an excellent job in laying the foundation for incorporating usability engineering concepts and best practices into corporations. Business success in the new economy will greatly depend on instituting the changes in design methods and thinking that are so clearly and simply put forth in this very practical and useful book."—Ed Israelski, Program Manager—Human Factors, Abbott Laboratories "For those of us who have evangelized usability for so many years, we finally have a book that offers meaningful insights that can only come from years of practical experience in the real world. Here is a wonderful guide for all who wish to make usability a 'way of life' for their companies."—Felica Selenko, Principal Technical Staff Member, AT&amp;T "Dr. Schaffer's mantra is that the main differentiator for companies of the future will be the ability to build practical, useful, usable, and satisfying applications and sites. This is a book that provides the road map necessary to allow your organization to achieve these goals." —Colin Hynes, Director of Site Usability, Staples, Inc. "Eric's methodology helped RBC Royal Bank's online banking complete a new user interface, and provided a blueprint for making usable designs a routine part of our development process. The site became successful in making money, saving money, and increasing customer satisfaction—evidencing the effectiveness of his approach."—Carolyn Burke, Senior Manager, e-Commerce and Payments Strategy, RBC Royal Bank of Canada "If you're tasked with bringing usability to a large organization, this book is for you (and your boss). Informed by years of case studies and consulting experience, Eric provides the long view, clearly describing what to expect, what to avoid, and how to succeed in establishing user-centered principles at your company."—Pat Malecek, User Experience Manager, AVP, CUA, A.G. Edwards &amp; Sons, Inc. "Usability issues are a key challenge for user-interface development of increasingly complex products and services. This book provides much-needed insights to help managers achieve their key objectives and to develop more successful solutions."—Aaron Marcus, President, Aaron Marcus and Associates At one time, computer hardware was the key differentiator in information technology—what gave an organization its competitive edge. Then, as hardware prices fell, software took center stage. Today, software has become a broadly shared commodity, and a new differentiator has emerged—usability. Applications, including Web sites, are usable if they are practical, useful, easy to work with, and satisfying. Usability is now the factor likeliest to give an organization a distinct advantage. Institutionalization of Usability shows how to make user-centered design and development a routine practice within an enterprise. Other excellent books explain precisely how to make software usable; this book builds on that foundation, and focuses instead on how to get usability recognized and incorporated into an organization's values and culture. Based on author Eric Schaffer's extensive experience, the book provides a solid methodology for institutionalizing usability, guiding readers step by step with practical advice on topics like organizational change, milestones, toolsets, infrastructure, and staffing requirements needed to achieve fully mature usability engineering. Learn how to: <ul>
<li>Educate your organization about the importance of usability </li> <li>Hire and coordinate usability staff and consultants</li> <li>Plan the standards, design, and implementation phases</li> <li>Retrofit a method that has added user-centered activities</li> <li>Recruit participants for usability interviews and testing </li> <li>Select the right staff and project to showcase—by timeline, user impact, and visibility</li> <li>Evangelize, train and mentor staff, and support the community</li> </ul>
Whether you are an executive leading the institutionalization process, a manager supporting the transition, or an engineer working on usability issues, Institutionalization of Usability will help you to build usability into your software practices.

Institutionalization of Usability: A Step-By-Step Guide

Computers & Technology

Schaffer, Eric

Games & Strategy Guides

Addison-Wesley Professional

“This book is a great how-to manual for people who want to bring the benefits of improved user experience to their companies. It’s thorough yet still accessible for the smart businessperson. I’ve been working with user-centered design for over twenty years, and I found myself circling tips and tricks.” –Harley Manning, vice president &amp; research director, customer experience, Forrester Research ”Some argue that the big advances in our impact on user experience will come from better methods or new technologies. Some argue that they will come from earlier involvement in the design and development process. The biggest impact, however, will come as more and more companies realize the benefits of user-centered design and build cultures that embrace it. Eric offers a practical roadmap to get there.” –Arnie Lund, connected experience labs technology leader and human—systems interaction lab manager, GE Global Research “User experience issues are a key challenge for development of increasingly complex products and services. This book provides much-needed insights to help managers achieve their key objectives and to develop more successful solutions.” –Aaron Marcus, president, Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. “This handy book should be required reading for any executive champions of change in any development organization making products that demand a compelling user experience. It does an excellent job in laying the foundation for incorporating user experience engineering concepts and best practices into these corporations. In today’s competitive economy, business success will greatly depend on instituting the changes in design methods and thinking that are so clearly and simply put forth in this most practical and useful book.” –Ed Israelski, director, human factors, AbbVie “If you’re tasked with building a user-experience practice in a large organization, this book is for you (and your boss). Informed by years of case studies and consulting experience, Eric Schaffer provides the long view, clearly describing what to expect, what to avoid, and how to succeed in establishing user-centered principles at your company.” –Pat Malecek, former user experience manager, AVP, CUA, A.G. Edwards &amp; Sons, Inc. ”For those of us who have evangelized user experience for so many years, we finally have a book that offers meaningful insights that can only come from years of practical experience in the real world. Here is a wonderful guide for all who wish to make user experience a ‘way of life’ for their companies.” –Feliça Selenko, Ph.D., former principal technical staff member, AT&amp;T “Dr. Schaffer’s mantra is that the main differentiator for companies of the future will be the ability to build practical, useful, usable, and satisfying user experiences. This is a book that provides the road map necessary to allow your organization to achieve these goals.” –Colin Hynes, president, UX Inc. Computer hardware no longer provides a competitive edge. Software has become a broadly shared commodity. A new differentiator has emerged in information technology: user experience (UX). Executives recognize that the customer satisfaction that applications and websites provide directly impacts a company’s stock price. While UX practitioners know how to design usable, engaging applications that create good user experiences, establishing that process on an industrial scale poses critical IT challenges for an organization. <ul>
<li>How do you build user-centered design into your culture?</li> <li>What infrastructure do you need in order to make UX design faster, cheaper, and better?</li> <li>How do you create the organizational structure and staffing solution that will support UX design over time?</li> </ul> Institutionalization of UX shows how to develop a mature, user-centered design practice within an enterprise. Eric Schaffer guides readers step by step through a solid methodology for institutionalizing UX, providing practical advice on the organizational change, milestones, toolsets, infrastructure, staffing, governance, and long-term operations needed to achieve fully mature UX engineering. First published in 2004 as Institutionalization of Usability, this new, expanded edition looks beyond the science of usability to the broader, deeper implications of UX: Once customers can use your applications and websites easily, how does your organization ensure that those engagements are satisfying, engaging, and relevant? Contextual innovation expert Apala Lahiri contributes a new chapter on managing cultural differences for international organizations. Whether you are an executive leading the institutional-ization process, a manager supporting the transition of your organization’s UX practice, or an engineer working on UX issues, this guide will help you build a mature and sustainable practice in UX design.

Institutionalization of UX: A Step-by-Step Guide to a User Experience Practice

Business & Money

Lahiri, Apala

Management & Leadership

K2 blackpearl and the K2 platform is a large, powerful, "game-changing" application platform built on Microsoft technologies. Understanding it from top to bottom would be a great task for a single person, which is why we have gathered more than a dozen authors to supply you with the information to successfully transform your company into a process-oriented, efficient business that can grow with the K2 platform.
Since this is the first book on K2 blackpearl, you will find a broad range of topics in this book, from the market in which K2 blackpearl is aimed to the architecture of the platform, from how to approach process design to developing your own custom user manager.
The first part of the book is meant for everyone and provides an understanding of K2 blackpearl and where it fits in the marketplace. It is included to provide a framework for thinking about various aspects of process-driven applications, including how they differ from business process management techniques; identifying processes in your company to automate, the different pieces that make up a process; measuring the success of your efforts; and finally shifting your company's culture in the direction of process efficiency. This section may be the only section you need to read if you are sponsoring a process improvement effort in your company. If you are responsible for leading the effort, make sure to read Chapters 3 and 4.
The other parts are meant to provide details on how to effectively deploy and use K2 blackpearl and include a broad range of topics. Read what you are most interested in, but also make sure to read Chapter 8, which will give you a great foundation to start designing processes with K2 blackpearl. Chapter 14 is also recommended for everyone because it provides an overview of the available K2 Designers and how you can share projects among them.
If you are a developer, you may be tempted to flip through the book looking for code, and you will find some, but we also recommend reading much of the rest of the book to learn how the API and the K2 platform extensions fit within the overall process-driven application environment. Pay particular attention to Chapter 22 and the Appendix, which may save you hours of coding or give you a no-code solution to something that you may have thought would take hundreds of lines of code to accomplish.
If you are an administrators, focus on Parts II and IV, but also take a look at the other chapters to gain an understanding of how your users will be using K2.
K2 blackpearl is the main subject of this book, although we devote an entire chapter, Chapter 23, to the add-on product K2 connect to give you an understanding of how to bring SAP data into your processes. We also talk a bit about K2 blackpoint, particularly in the SharePoint chapters. Since K2 blackpoint is built on the K2 blackpearl foundation, many of the same concepts apply to that product as well, but we do not point out the differences between K2 blackpearl and K2 blackpoint. For that information browse to www.k2.com.
We recommend that you approach this book in parts and perhaps read or reference each part differently. If you are working on a team, each member of the team may find one part more interesting to them than the other sections; that is expected and is how we designed the book.
<ul>
<li>
Part I, “Introduction to K2 blackpearl and Process-Driven Applications”: The first four chapters discuss what K2 blackpearl is, how the applications you can design may or may not fit the business process management (BPM) model, how to go about identifying and designing processes, and last how to measure results and shift the culture of your company to a more process-oriented business.</li>
<li>
Part II, “Architecture and Installation Options for K2 blackpearl”: Chapters 5 and 6 will get you started. Installing the K2 blackpearl components is a necessary step before you can start designing processes, so in these two chapters you will gain an understanding of all of the pieces of the platform, the architecture, and the supporting technology, as well as ideas on how to plan out your development, QA/staging, and production environments.</li>
<li>
Part III, “K2 blackpearl Process Planning and Design Essentials”: Chapters 7 through 14 give you a ton of information about how to design, build, extend, and generally work with the main pieces of the platform. From a step-by-step tutorial on building your first process to how to share processes across the different K2 Designers, you'll learn all of what you need to really get ramped up. Pay particular attention to Chapters 8 and 11, which cover the basic things you need to know about process planning and the various concepts of process design with K2 blackpearl and then provide an in-depth view of the available forms technologies that you can use for user interaction with your processes. If you are particularly interested in SharePoint, make sure to read Chapters 12 and 13.</li>
<li>
Part IV, “Administration of K2 blackpearl”: Chapters 15 through 20 offer an administrator's view into the platform. Things like disaster recovery, logging, security, and using the K2 Workspace for notifications, reports, assigning process permissions, and recovering from errors are all key aspects of the platform that you or someone in your company will have to understand. This section gives you everything you need to know and probably more, including how to build your own user manager to plug into the K2 platform.</li>
<li>
Part V, “Advanced K2 blackpearl Concepts and Platform Extensions”: The last part includes Chapters 21 through 23, and these chapters are there to round out the discussion of the platform. You'll find information about using the Event Bus to surface outside events to the K2 server and a discussion of tailoring the platform and your processes to your particular needs by going beyond the default settings of the components that you learned about in Chapter 8. Finally you'll learn about the K2 connect platform extension, which allows data from SAP (and eventually any system for which a WCF LOB adapter is released) to be used within your processes.</li>
</ul>
There are some pieces of this book that you can sit down and read without needing a computer or access to K2 blackpearl at all, but much of this book requires you to have access to K2 blackpearl and the supporting applications as well. Whenever we talk about designing processes, we do so in the context of the K2 Designer for Visual Studio. To install this component you will need Visual Studio 2005. Support for Visual Studio 2008 may be available by the time this book is published, so look for that on www.k2.com.
For the server pieces of the platform, you will need a Windows Server 2003 environment (virtual or otherwise) and the additional components required by the K2 server.

Professional K2 blackpearl

Murphy, Colin

TALLEY

Montgomery, Jason

Geier, Chris

Anderson, Holly

Apergis, Jason

Del Piccolo, Sergio

Kaji, Codi

Leisegang, Shaun

Macori, Igor

Malherbe, Gabriel

O'CONNOR, CHRIS

Petro, Anthony

Programming Languages

Wrox

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