User Interface Design In Agile Projects

In this enhanced version of our well-received tutorial in NordiCHI'14 we will teach the way we design UIs at Reaktor and share our lessons learned from more than 10 years of design in agile projects. No previous knowledge of UI design is required, but the participants should know at least the basics of agile development in order to follow the examples and discussion in the second part. The course has two parts: First we will teach how to create straightforward UI designs in a systematical fashion. This part focuses on demos and hands-on exercises with a minimal amount of theory, talk and slides. It is based on the GUIDe method and UI design courses that have been taught to hundreds of students at the University of Helsinki and developed further at Reaktor. In the second part we will present our current state of the art in combining design activities (conceptual design, UI design, graphics design, ...) with agile development. In the past 10 years, we have tried out many different approaches. We will show practical examples of real projects with their results and illustrate, what practices worked, what did not and why. This part is an interactive lesson -- the participants are most welcome to ask a lot of questions during the session. The instructors are all designers at Reaktor, a Finland-based software consultancy with offices in New York, Tokyo and Helsinki. Most of them have been teaching at University of Helsinki, Dept. of Computer Science. Today, they make sure that the software built at Reaktor solves meaningful and financially viable problems. In practice, they find out what parts of the users' work would benefit most of software support and draw straightforward UI solutions for them.