Launchpad's quest for a better and agile user interface

Abstract

Introducing change into an established team with an aging code base is always a challenge. This paper is about my experience in shifting the Launchpad teams' focus to a more user-friendly mindset, evolving the existing processes to encourage constant improvements in the user interface and teaching developers to see their work from the users' perspective. We went from nobody owning the user interface to the developers feeling strong ownership over it, and I describe the ups and downs we went through as a team, what worked, what didn't, and what we could have done better. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.