Agile Synchronicity
Sometimes a theme seems to come together out of your experiences over a few days. Recently I've begun referring to Austin Govella's Six Strategies for More Agile User Experience in my presentations, emphasizing his points about separating modeling from design and kicking around (sketching) design ideas with other team members all the time, while spreading "design literacy" around your organization. Just the other day David Verba wrote an article about the advantages of prototyping collaboratively with your team. Furthermore, I read about Behavior Driven Development within an agile team in a blog entry by David Starr.
I'm curious what the biggest issues are these days with regard to bringing good user experience to bear within an organization that tries to follow agile development practices.
Comments
There's a lot to think about around these posts, however I think the biggest issue centres around understanding. Certainly in my organisation, awareness falls short on UX. I'm sure there is variation on understanding between organisations but I'm sure this is a commonality. Austin realises this when talking about his team; and leaving good books around is a good call - I'm always advocating Cooper's IARTA book as it gives a great tech agnostic view. A kind of "Aha!" for everyone.
Agile is a buzz word around the office but only in the sense of coding. Quick iterations of design are tough to work in, so as you suggest: dividing up the mental model into chunks is probably more achievable.
Also as Jess points out; what constitutes design can cause confusion between departments and can blur UX on a project. As soon as visual design creeps into the frame it tends to cloud the focus.
It takes great communication and teamwork, proper teamwork to work our ideals into a corp workflow; and a design leadership which is allowed and able to lead and organise.
Posted by: richard | June 25, 2008 04:50 AM