William Hudson

User-centred design with use case methods

Lecture date: 4 Jun 2003

Some forty clients gathered in the library in the Namahn offices to listen to William Hudson describe his approach to user-centred design with use cases. Hudson, a software engineer, who runs his own design consultancy based in the UK, has extensive experience in designing interactive systems as well as being a writer and lecturer on the subject.

Methodologies employed in the software development process, such as the Rational Unified Process, as well as agile processes like eXtreme Programming are fundamentally system centred. Hudson introduced his listeners, many of whom were drawn from the software development field, to the principles of user-centred design and showed how it was possible to integrate this into all stages of the software development process. He stressed the importance of the early creation of a conceptual model focused on the user rather than implementation issues. He then demonstrated how use cases can be employed to translate this abstract model into functional specifications to ensure that user requirements are included in the final product and the interface is an integral part of it. The increased understanding and integration between software developers and usability specialists afforded by this approach provides a significant benefit.

About the speaker

Namahn Lecture: William Hudson

William Hudson is a User Experience Strategist who consults, writes and teaches in the fields of user-centred design, user experience and usability. He has over 45 years experience in the development of interactive systems, initially with a background in software engineering. William was the product and user interface designer for the Emmy-award-winning “boujou”; now an indispensable tool in many film studios.

He has specialised in interaction design and human-computer interaction since the late 1980’s. William has written and taught courses which have been presented to hundreds of software and web developers, designers and managers in the UK, North America and Europe. He has developed and presented courses for the Nielsen Norman Group. William is the founder and principal consultant of Syntagm, a consultancy specialising in the design of interactive systems established in 1985.

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