UX Agile

14 November 2008 | Agile, Product Design | andy

While I didn’t get to attend many talks at Agile Dev Practices due to great number of customers and new leads who were willing to participate in a round of usability testing (thanks!), in looking through the proceedings the deck for “From Concept to Backlog: What Happens Before Iteration 0” by Gerard Meszaros resonated to me.  It’s available online at http://Concept2Backlog.gerardm.com.

The acronyms referenced in the post title are ones you’ll likely run into quickly if you’re working in an agile methodology.  BDUF stands for “big design up front” and is a 4 letter word for agilists.  YAGNI comes from the usage “Don’t look ahead because YAGNI!” and stands for “you ain’t gonna need it.”

He describes a case where the focus on individual stories (aka “Story Blinders”) without a higher level concern across stories lead to UI inconsistency. 

There are lots of good ideas in the talk around communicating a product vision.  On the UX side, Gerard Meszaros prescribes a scaled down use-case process ala task modeling, personas, paper prototyping, and wizard of oz studies.   

Jeff Patton’s story mapping approach would also seem to facilitate avoiding story blinders and is more suited than Meszaros’ ideas for long standing products.  And, for UI consistency issues, the style guide (or human interface guidelines, abbreviated HIG) is a well proven technique that should be adaptable to agile flow.

I’m working towards a parallel track ala the Autodesk experiences in my work. I’ll let you know how it goes.