Audrey Crane will be one of the keynote speakers at AIM’s Heartland Developers Conference on Friday, September 7 at 9 a.m.
Crane’s talk is titled “Engineers and Designers, in Harmony” and will focus on the complex relationship between the two disciplines.
“In the old days, the relationship wasn’t great, and it didn’t get better with the advent of Agile,” said Crane, who has more than 20 years of experience of software product design in and around Silicon Valley. “I think developers stereotypically thought of designers as kind of unrealistic artists who didn’t understand software and were making unreasonable demands on them. And on the other hand, designers have felt at times like developers didn’t value their work or weren’t willing to think outside the box. But we’ve moved beyond that.”
Crane says she will talk about ways designers and developers can work together more successfully.
She says she has seen many examples of great software that lacks well-designed user interfaces. She says that a stronger focus good design can lead to a healthier bottom line.
“It’s not held up as something that someone besides an engineer should do. There’s an expertise that someone should have when they do it. It can be a differentiator that really moves the needle for a business. It can have a connection to the bottom line,” Crane said.
Crane will also take part in a breakout session Friday afternoon. In A Digital Transformation Case Study with TEAM Software, Crane and Michelle Shanholtz, vice president of product management at TEAM Software, will talk about how the company reworked its approach to software development.
“It’s really a digital transformation story in the way that they reconsidered what their software offering was and frankly, how they created that software, so they could be agile and learn from users through primary research and make change over time based on what they learned,” said Crane.
For more information about Crane and other HDC speakers, visit AIM’s Heartland Developers Conference website.