Also a a big thanks to the folks at Setup Utrecht for their hard work in setting up the skillswap to begin with! I talked to some cool people about usability practice in their day to day work plus we also had a great opportunity to get a sneak preview of the iPad version of WappZapp. You can read the whole story on the setup website here (Dutch)

The slides :

Some cool photos were taken during the evening, thanks to Frank-Jan van Lunteren

What works and what does not?
How do you get your apps head and shoulders above the rest in terms of user interface & interaction. How can you make informed choices when it comes to your apps design? How can you use low-budget methods to test your app with users? These are some of the question we will try to answer. The workshop will show what works does not work in apps with good examples and case studies. To finish the evening we will review some apps together and see if we can evaluate some usability issues and potential room for improvement.

Info

For my graduation internship I started at Service2Media on the first of February on the subject of mobile User Experience (UX).
Service2Media is one of the world’s fast growing companies in creating Advanced App Solutions for smart phones, tablets and new emerging touch devices. The company develops, uses and licenses a platform called M2Active that makes it possible to target a wide range of mobile operation systems with one App, all from a single design and code base. This also makes it possible for future updates to be applied fast and effortless, this is called the “App lifecycle”

My goal is to find ways to further increase the App quality trough improving the UX.
Since the process at Service2Media is currently evolving from a waterfall to a SCRUM/Agile approach, so it’s imperative that UX improvement happens within this new process. The app lifecycle strategy is iterative on it’s own, so the room for UX involvement is vast and the range of possibilities very promising.

Bringing all this into practice means writing my thesis will have the following approach :

1. Identify the common UX definitions, tools, methods, practices, etc.
2. Investigate the scrum / agile process and the options for integrating UX.
3. Recommend a strategic UX approach for S2M, creating different tools and templates for applying UX.

Of course I plan to test the proposed agile UX approach in a project during my time at Service2Media.
I’ll keep you posted on the progress, more to come in the next months!