22 Sep 2006 0825H

Agile User Experience

Caught this article on agile methods and user experience on Spool’s UIE site, and I was reminded of this by Lou Rosenfeld at his recent Chicago seminar: “we should be trying to get away from phases.” Agile methodologies have been center-stage for some time now, but it’s taken a while to get creatives, especially those of us caught pretty much flatfooted by the dotcom crash and the two years of no work that followed, to respond to these new methods in ways that we can insert ourselves into the product development lifecycle so we can inform the user experience. Basically — although I’m doing some violence to what agile is — agile is a development methodology that embraces change in a way that the old methods, which were called waterfall methods, did not.

Waterfall methods proceed from phase to phase, signoffs for each phase, dependencies that need to be completed before moving on, and so on. But waterfall methods for developing software are also less flexible to the sometimes chaotic changes that occur in an enterprise, and therefore, since the development philosophy is less flexible, exposes the team to risks like schedule slips and even nondelivery. By embracing the inevitability of change, agile seeks to minimize risk by dividing the old phases and tasks into very small chunks. The team puts a timebox of two weeks around every design/develop/evaluate feedback cycle of development to work out so many chunks. Then, through a combination of cross-functional teamwork and automated testing, agile methods basically increase the delivery rate of software, shorten the delivery time, and are able to respond to changes in environment much more quickly than before, since the functionality is being more closely observed than before. . . .

ETA: Oh, looks like Don Norman talked about this too some time ago. . . Why doing User Observations First Is Wrong, he muses. This stands in stark contrast to others like Alan Cooper, who is not alone, I think, about doing Big Design Up Front. These are religious differences, though. . . there are instances and projects where the work is best informed by this approach, particularly in situations where there is much ambiguity. In this case, User Experience can provide the leadership to fill the knowledge gaps to enable the agilists to do their thing.

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