Agile + User Experience Design
May 4, 2009 at 5:18 am | In Architecture, Design, Process, Product development, Project management, Strategy, User Experience | 2 CommentsI’ve recently been thinking about how to better blend Agile development and User Experience Design.
Given my education in Industrial Design (ID), that was a natural first place to see what models might translate. Yes, there is all the prototyping, mockups, and rendering that are highly applicable to any software project. However ID doesn’t really do it because it is classic “waterfall-based” design approach. There is no other choice when designing for manufacturing on an assembly line. Everything has to be defined up front in order to build the tooling and stamp out the parts.
Next, I looked to Architecture (the building kind). Although I’m not an Architect, nor do I have Architectural training, I helped to re-design the kitchen and master bedroom/bathroom of my house. I also served as general contractor on the kitchen remodel. Building buildings is a lot more like software development than ID. You try to define most things before construction begins, but there are always quite a
User Experience Design Simplified
May 4, 2009 at 4:34 am | In Business, Design, Process, Product development, User Experience | Leave a CommentA product management colleague recently asked me for a concise explanation of user experience design. Here goes…
- Product UI designs should be based on real-world use cases & customer needs
- There are multiple possible solution spaces for any design problem—each one has relative pros & cons
- Design assumptions & decisions should be VALIDATED with users (and your sales team) BEFORE “beau coup” dollars are spent on implementing them
- This point is somewhat orthogonal to the above, but is important if you are designing a suite of products; in this case you should be leveraging design patterns & standards across those tools in order to ensure transfer of training, ease of learning & use, and coherence within the suite
This doesn’t mean that Ux design is easy or trivial, or that by simply following these steps you will end up with good products. However if you don’t follow these steps in your process you can pretty much be assured of ending up with products that suck.
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