Bernhard Kappe, CEO, Pathfinder Associates
- In the race to add features more quickly than their competitors, many vendors are leaving their customers behind. From a customer perspective, applications are getting more complex and harder to use. As a consequence, more customers are making ease of use and accessibility a selection metric on par with technology and functionality.

This talk focuses on how user experience design best practices can help product managers address these selection metrics and provides real world examples of how software vendors have integrated them into their product management practice. Topics covered include:
- How to uncover unmet customer needs and develop more effective product requirements through best practices in user research.
- How to use requirements visualization and rapid prototyping to discover missing requirements, clarify uncertainties and speed development.
- How to design and test for ease of use.
- How to integrate user research, iterative prototyping, user interface design and user testing into the software life cycle.
Bernhard Kappe is founder and CEO of Pathfinder Associates, a consulting company that helps Global 2000 companies and software vendors design and develop great applications. Bernhard's perspective on the software industry is informed by 18 years of experience as a consultant, software entrepreneur and investment banker in mergers and acquisitions.