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Nielsen Norman Group
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| Strategies to enhance the user experience | ||||||
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Nielsen Norman Group
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| Strategies to enhance the user experience | ||||||
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Chicago
Amsterdam
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Offshore Usability: A Necessary Outcome of Offshore Development
Jhumkee Iyengar Offshore development is now an established and rapidly growing part of international business, and as such is both defining new markets and redefining global industry trends. But what of the user experience of products that are developed offshore? Can such software fit right back in, as envisioned, to its originating culture? Do we somehow need to address the user experience of products developed offshore in a different way? If so, what are the key aspects of offshore usability? Cost is one of the primary reasons that companies send work offshore. But the cost arbitrage rationale and the distributed development scenario have shaped the offshore industry in ways that are rarely conducive to good usability practices. User experience is an emerging profession in many offshore destinations. Establishing a global model of user experience is complex and challenging, but it’s also imperative if we’re to achieve consistency, predictability, and quality in the user experience over the long term. In this tutorial, you’ll learn about the dynamics and challenges of working in offshore user experience, and participate in exercises that will help you understand the environment’s key issues. You’ll learn how to initiate an offshore user experience engagement, maximize the drivers, and overcome the inhibitors, as well as how to leverage global collaboration to establish an effective partnership and model. What You’ll LearnIn this session, you’ll learn:
Course Outline
FormatThis full-day tutorial includes lectures, visual representations and concepts, industry-specific insights, and in-class exercises. HandoutsCopies of presentation slides. Who Should Attend?This course is for user experience professionals or project managers—from small or large organizations—who are engaged in or planning to initiate offshore development and are thus facing the challenges of managing user experience issues. Instructor
Jhumkee Iyengar is Principal Consultant at User In Design in Pune, India, providing consulting services
to start-up organizations and those new to user experience. She has more than 16 years’ experience in both the US and
India, serving in technical, consulting, research, and project leadership roles. In the US, Iyengar worked at Pitney Bowes
and Philips Research Laboratories, designing small consumer products with embedded systems and creating software-driven user
interfaces and documentation for next-generation products and concepts. In India, she’s consulted for organizations
in offshore usability and for service providers initiating user experience services for the Indian market. Most recently,
she founded the Usability Engineering service at an outsourced product development company, where she was instrumental in
both envisioning and realizing the service, and then leading new initiatives and research for the effort’s long-term interests.
She also launched Usability in e-Governance, a community initiative for Pune city. Iyengar holds a Master's in human factors
engineering design from Tufts University; a Master's in product design from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay; and a
B.S. in mechanical engineering from College of Engineering, Pune, India. She has written several articles and presentations
for national and international conferences and has delivered several invited talks. Her current research interests are
offshore usability, usability in e-Governance, and the overlap of usability and industrial design.
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