Software for real people—what's that?

Hi, I'm Willie Wheeler, and I create software for real people. You might ask: "As opposed to what? Unreal people?"

YES!

Too much software is designed for imaginary people—imaginary in that the design targets assumptions about what real people do, need to do, want to do, think, feel, prefer, notice, understand, put up with, and so forth. The resulting software is often simply unusable.

Why does usability matter? Once upon a time, there wasn't much people could do about user-unfriendly software, because they didn't discover the problems until after they'd already purchased it. But now customers get to use your website—and possibly sample your product or service—before they buy. Any problems and your competitors are only a click away.

How I can help. Usable software is my passion. I have eleven years of professional software development experience, and seven years of professional experience with user-centered design and usability engineering methods. I know how to use real end users to drive a development effort that results in software they'll love.

I offer consulting services in multiple areas. Please contact me to discuss your project.

Selected technical articles

• Annotation-Based Autowiring in Spring 2.5
• Annotation-Based MVC in Spring 2.5
• Annotation-Based Transactions in Spring
• Annotation-Based Validation with the Spring Bean Validation Framework
• Apache/Tomcat Integration
• Build a Shopping Cart with Spring Web Flow 2.0
• Make Web Services Transparent with Spring 2.5 and Apache CXF 2.0
• Overview of Acegi
• Send E-mail Using Spring and JavaMail
• Web Services with Spring 2.5 and Apache CXF 2.0