Dr. Lee McIntyre

Business Objects Corporate Speaker
http://www.businessobjects.com/

Bringing User-centered Design Sensibility to Enterprise Software

Business Objects makes Business Intelligence software for Enterprise customers. Historically, business intelligence software was typically designed by engineers, who understood the complexity of the back-end systems that business intelligence software requires. The emphasis was on complex features, but not on the usability of the end user experience.
For the past 3 years, Business Objects has been expanding a new User Experience team, whose role is to bring user-centered design principles to the product life cycle, so that the Business Objects software is not only feature rich, but easy-to-use.

This talk will focus on some methodologies that the User Experience team employs to understand our users and their tasks better, and how we apply that data to enhancing the usability of the UI in our products. How you can get to a win-win situation - where the needs of the user are balanced with the needs and constraints of the cross-functional development team - will also be discussed.

Biography

Lee McIntyre has been designing award-winning software for the past 16 years. Currently, Lee is the Manager for the North American User Experience team at Business Objects, located in the Vancouver, BC office. Since joining Business Objects two years ago, Lee has built the UE team in North America from the ground up, evangelizing user-centered design within the company to gain acceptance and "a place at the table" for the UE team, where the emphasis is on making Business Intelligence software easier for the average business user.

Prior to joining Business Objects, Lee spent 5 years as Senior User Interaction Designer FileMaker, Inc. (an Apple Computer subsidiary). While at FileMaker, Lee was the original UI Architect for the FileMaker Mobile product line for Palm, Pocket PC and iMode phones, as well as for the FileMaker Developer/FileMaker Advanced products. Lee also led the redesign of the FileMaker Instant Web Publishing project, creating an easy-to-use experience for customers to bring databases to the web.

In addition to business software, Lee has also worked on the academic side of the fence. Lee was the Associate Director for the award-winning Art and Life in Africa project, designing and programming both an interactive CD-ROM textbook and an associated website. Lee also worked on designing and developing interactive multimedia language software; these projects included templates for language teachers to use, plus a complete interactive video course on Hausa (a language spoken in Nigeria).