The Management Toolkit

This chapter has introduced five dimensions of user interface management. These dimensions collectively form a menu of approaches that we think are applicable to any business in which smart product interfaces are developed. The details of how those tools are applied may need to be adjusted to the scope and dynamics of the business in question, but the selection has to be there at a minimum. To summarize, the approaches are:

Vision management. By painting attractive goals for the design, vision management drives development. It aims at lighting the sparks of innovation, getting the audience committed to the concept, and allowing everyone to contribute.

Team management. The skills of team management facilitate the birth of new creative solutions, concepts, and innovations by gathering together the right kind of competencies, motivating the group, and creating the conditions to foster its work. Competitions boost the imagination and ensure a scope of design proposals sufficiently wide for consolidating concepts.

Quality management. A continuous and gradually more focused usability evaluation program is a necessary management tool to secure the quality of the design. Managing usability assessment is about ongoing tradeoffs between keeping tight schedules and getting valid results.

Documentation management. User interface design generates and uses large amounts of information, the character of which varies from detailed specifications to overall insights to the company design heritage. These all have to be documented, and documents have to be updated, with their utilization supported. Planning and running the documentation system is a necessary, if perhaps not so exciting, area of UI management.

Consistency management. Multifaceted activity prevails in consistency management. Phone applications have to be internally and externally consistent. Solutions over the product range have to be as harmonious as segmentation requirements allow. Succeeding product generations may introduce different UI styles and solutions only when these novelties produce obvious end-user value.

In our research labs and in the labs of our suppliers, we find ourselves looking at the evolving and emerging UI technologies: displays, control devices such as micro joysticks, sophisticated browsers, and over-the-air downloadable applications. The next revolution may be where the terminal evolves from an impersonal object to an intimate possession containing one's most important data and thoughts. No matter how the mobile device interaction paradigms and technologies evolve, reliable management tools that have been hardened in a crucible of daily use will remain essential.