Posts Tagged ‘Agile’

A Tale of Two Conferences

by Hugh Beyer

I’ve attended two conferences in the last three weeks—Jared Spool’s UX Immersions conference, and CHI 2012, the primary computer-human interaction conference. UX Immersions was the smaller conference, focusing this year on the Agile/UX interface and on design for mobile devices. It was a great group of very focused people and, as it was run by Jared’s [...]

The Limits of Iterative Development

by Hugh Beyer

One of the ongoing questions in Agile development is whether and how much up-front design needs to be done. This is my perspective.

Agile 2011

by Hugh Beyer

I’m back from Agile 2011. Another week spent in one of the most beautiful parts of America, with sunny days in the 70’s—spent in windowless, air-conditioned rooms with a bunch of computer geeks. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The Agile conference continues to be one of the more exciting conferences around, and [...]

Simple Methods for Reliable User Involvement

by Hugh Beyer

Hugh will be presenting at the Agile conference again this year, talking about basic techniques for getting users involved in your Agile sprints. From the conference program: One of the difficult problems faced by an Agile team is that of getting reliable user input. Since Agile projects depend on minimal up-front planning and specification, user [...]

CHI2011: Agile at CHI

by Hugh Beyer

Moving the industry to an effective integration of Agile development with UX and the larger product development practice is going to take a lot more education, promotion, and repetition of the basic message: giving the UX designers their rightful place at the Agile table.

Phase 0

by Hugh Beyer

Has any Agile project ever kicked off without a Phase 0? I don’t think so. But if you’ve been working happily without a Phase 0, I’d like to hear about it.

The Role of the UX Professional on an Agile Team

by Hugh Beyer

Making compelling products and applications

Agile’s Just a Fad

by Hugh Beyer

“Agile is just a fad.” Somebody said that to me the other day, and I’m sure you’ve heard the same if you’re involved in Agile development at all. I had the usual half-defensive, half-annoyed reaction one has when on the receiving end of such a remark. But then I started to mull over the question. [...]

The Agile 2010 Conference: Agile Grows Up

by Hugh Beyer

I’m on my way back from Agile 2010, the main industry conference on Agile methods and tools. If I had to choose one theme for the conference, it would be something like “Agile Grows Up”—not only has Agile become mainstream, but the community is starting to recognize and tackle the real issues of doing development in organizations.

InContext Does Agile

by Hugh Beyer

There’s a fair backlog of news from the Agile world that I want to share with folks. We’ve been involved in working with Agile teams, and working out the relationship between Agile methods and user-centered design for some years now. Here are our latest activities.

Why Developers Don’t Think Systemically

by Hugh Beyer

BJ Clark over at Marked as Pertinent has an interesting post on who should do acceptance testing. He starts there, but he spends most of the post on the really interesting question, which is the role of the Interaction Designer (ID). His claim, which I agree with, is that the ID is responsible for the [...]

Agile development at CHI

by Hugh Beyer

I attended CHI 2010 week before last and it was interesting and insightful as usual. There were lots of great ideas, interaction paradigms and insightful research being presented. But one topic was not much addressed by official conference sessions, but was common in the hallway conversations: how to deal with agile software development. I go [...]

Agile Development and User Centered Design

by Hugh Beyer

What is Agile? Agile methods are a relatively new approach to producing software. In contrast to traditional approaches that emphasize requirements analysis, design, and implementation as distinct phases, Agile methods seek to minimize up-front planning in favor of producing working code quickly and often. Feedback from these baselevels is used to ensure that the resulting [...]

Essential Agile

by Hugh Beyer

The essential core of agile is fast iterations tested with user feedback. Everything else is there to make that core work better, faster, or in a more organized way. Throw away everything else if you must but don’t trade off this core. Let me explain why…

InContext at Agile 2009 Conference

by Hugh Beyer

Agile 2009 is the yearly international conference on agile software development. I’ll be presenting a tutorial called Four Core Concepts for Fast User Feedback in which I’ll be talking about techniques for getting good (and real) customer feedback into agile iterations. It should be a good time–these conferences are generally fun and insightful. See you [...]

Rapid User-Centered Design Techniques

by Karen Holtzblatt, InContext, Lisa Baker, LANDesk, and Joerg Beringer, SAP

Challenges and Solutions Why it matters: Organizations are challenged today to shorten and simplify processes but also want to get customer data into the development cycle. This is especially the case when development follows Agile development methods such as Extreme Programming (XP). When development experiences a tight timeframe or teams react to heavy weight front-end [...]

Just the Essentials—Adapting Contextual Design to a Narrowly-Scoped Project

by Wendy Fritzke

Why it matters: When working in “Web-time” it’s important to focus on the Contextual Design techniques that will get the data you need in the brief time frame allowed Contextual Design needs to work in conjunction with other processes used by the organization When the essential design is set, a full-blown User Environment Design is [...]