Software products frequently fail because users are not involved in the development process or are involved too late or not systematically, which leads to usability problems and a bad user experience. It is important for product managers on the one hand to recognise the outstanding relevance of usability engineering (UE) and user experience (UX) for their products and on the other hand to learn methods on how they can implement and execute UX and UE in their company.

This workshop will show software product managers how to incorporate User Experience (UX) and Usability Engineering (UE) into their product management process. This includes the demonstration of proven methods from Mittelstand 4.0-Kompetenzzentrum Usability, and the organizational implementation of UX and UE. Real-world case SB:Digital is used to illustrate how semi-structured interviews as widely accepted research method can be applied and what needs to be considered when doing so. The insights gained from the interviews and a deep understanding of the context of use are used to create personas and scenarios to describe a new product, its use and the experiential quality. The participants will apply these three methods in the workshop and we will discuss the results of the practical exercises afterwards.

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Katharina Peine is interested in business aspects of IT applications and company-internal software product management. She holds a master degree in technically-oriented business administration and a PhD (Dr. rer. pol.) in technically oriented business administration, University of Stuttgart. In her PhD thesis „Situational design of software product management“ she examined the role of product managers across different types of organizations. Katharina Peine works as product manager at highQ Computerlösungen GmbH, Freiburg. As an ISPMA fellow member she teaches the ISPMA Certified Software Product Manager training (excellence level: software product strategy). She is also an associate lecturer at the University of Stuttgart, University of Applied Sciences Esslingen, Germany and Duale Hochschule Villingen-Schwenningen.

Elisabeth Stein is a research assistant at the Information Experience and Design Research Group (IXD) of Prof. Dr. Michael Burmester at Stuttgart Media University. She studied information design and is currently doing her master degree in Media Research. She has been involved in the development and application of usability and user experience methods with SMEs in her work in the Mittelstand 4.0-Kompetenzzentrum Usability.