The concepts of change and evolution - or - who in the world is Martin?
My name is Martin Christensen. I call myself a usability designer and an agile coach. My goal is to make a significant difference in the world. This might seem a bit preposterous, but the concept of change is what I am most passionate about. Usability and agile methods have this in common; They are both great tools for quickly visualising what's important and what is not. Thus making them great for changing how people think and for the evolution of our IT systems.
My main focus is the user's experience of an IT system, and aiding me in creating a hassle-free and even enjoyable user experience are these paradigms:
- User-centred design
- making a product more efficient, effective, satisfying to use and easier to learn by understanding the users' needs - Interaction design
- designing a system which focuses on the goals of the users and defining the behaviour of the system in response to them - Information architecture - creating a well-structured design in information-centric systems
Complementing this to improve quality I am proficient in:
- Agile methods - by valuing customer collaboration, creating a great teamwork setting and conducting iterative & incremental development with small release cycles
- Effect management - by helping the customer and the development team to create expected business benefits
By preparing for change as a usability designer I interview users and stakeholders, I do effect mapping, user analysis, field studies, ethnographic studies, contextual inquiries, focus groups, usage scenarios, use cases, storyboards, personas, brainstorming, card sorting, wireframes, prototyping, role-playing, usage models, blueprints, controlled vocabularies, navigation maps, usability measurement, qualitative & quantitative usability tests and more.
By preparing for change as an agile coach I assess the development process, use the correct methods in the actual context and communicate with my team mates (which is easy due to my background in computer engineering). I coach, teach, plan and adapt Scrum, Extreme Programming, Kanban and Lean Software Development.
By doing this, I will make a difference, in the right context, at the right time...
