Please note that this lecture has been rescheduled from its original date.

March 16, 2012

Speaker: Paula Bach

The fast iteration prototyping study methodology addresses three issues: testing early and often, iterating as much as possible, and getting stakeholders involved. The method is for use early in the development cycle so that teams can explore multiple prototypes in parallel and choose the right design with which to move forward. Several features in Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE were subjected to this method in 2010 and 2011. The talk will explore the rationale for the method, some details about the process, and a case study of a feature in Visual Studio. The case study shows how the method helped choose the right way forward and how rapid iteration resulted in many changes and refinements. The feature improvements will be released in the next version of Visual Studio coming out in Spring 2012.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Paula M. Bach is a UX researcher at Microsoft studying how developers work to help make their tools work better for them. Previously she was a postdoctoral research associate at The University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) working with Dr. Michael Twidale as an NSF-funded Computing Innovation Fellow. Dr. Bach completed her dissertation, "Supporting the User Experience in Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) Development" working in the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Lab and Penn State Center for HCI under the direction of Dr. John M. Carroll, Edward M. Frymoyer professor of Information Sciences and Technology. Her academic research explored ways in which sociotechnical solutions foster participation in open source communities from HCI professionals and HCI-interested users as well as investigating other ways to make FLOSS more usable.