Collaboration-Based Usability Training for Developers

Applying user-centered design methodology, we developed a usability training workshop for beginning developers which has remarkable impact on participants’ attitudes towards the collaboration with nontechnical professions. Mainly through a simulation game we let course participants experience typical pitfalls of and opportunities for collaboration with non-technical professions in the development team, with the primary focus on User Interface Designers. Rather than teaching abstract high-level usability principles we induce learning by insight and social forms of learning. 1 The Challenge: What & How to Teach Developers? Computer science curriculum studies are still slow to embrace user-centered development methods (Kaasinen & Clarke 1998). Consequently, much of the usability training and education for developers is left to corporate training organizations. In their specific context, corporate instructional designers need to address a set of typical problems in order to create effective usability training for developers. Because tasks related to usability are not the professional focus of a developer, the allotment of time and resources for training is limited. As usability and interaction design experts, we face the problem that boiling down our expertise to a 2-day course runs the danger of resulting in commonplace statements. Additionally, developers are not and will not be usability specialists, no matter how much effort we spend on instructing them. The variety of products which is common in a large software company, as well as the context of rapidly evolving technical platforms, make it hard for instructional designers to develop focussed training content. Meta knowledge on how to access and use standards is often more useful than knowledge on specific product standards. Furthermore, user-centered development being a multidisciplinary activity, trainees need to acquire cross-disciplinary collaboration skills. Consequently, social and motivational aspects are much more important to convey in a training than encyclopedic, principle-oriented knowledge. In this paper we present an approach which exemplifies the integrated application of Usability and Instructional Design expertise to the problems outlined above, and we would like to discuss it within the professional community. 2 User-Centered Instructional Design The authors’ professional background lies both in the fields of HCI and Instructional Design. While the User Centered Development approach to Software Engineering and the Instructional M. Herczeg, W. Prinz, H. Oberquelle (Hrsg.): Mensch & Computer 2002: Vom interaktiven Werkzeug zu kooperativen Arbeitsund Lernwelten. Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 2002, S. 285-291.