Agile is not a process, it's a mitigation strategy

Fellow Macadamian, founder, and Chief Architect at Macadamian has written a great Critical Path article on why design thinking is failing to penetrate software companies.

I had an AH-HA moment when Francis mentioned that "Agile is not a process, it's a mitigation strategy". Truer words have never been spoken.

If you are interested in more about what Alan Cooper thinks about design and Agile, catch his keynote address at Agile 2008, it was very controversial.

This is his complete slide deck and his speaking notes, sorry, no audio. If you want to listen to the audio, one of the attenders of the conference taped it.

Who wags who?

It's an old joke to ask if the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog. The saying fits in many contexts outside of media, including the age old battle between testing and engineering, or the usability of the application, and the technical design of the application. Do the user experience (UX) folks design without regards to the technical feasibility of their work, or does the engineering team dictate design by imposing technical constraints?

Jumping in the way back machine, five or six years ago I was working on a large web application, it was Macadamian's first project where the engineering team implemented the output of an interaction designer. When asked, I told the designer to go ahead, don't let technology limit your designs. Sure enough, we ended up creating an impressive web application (see left) with all the bells and whistles of a rich internet application, all back in 2003. I also lived at work for weeks implementing all that cool stuff. I wish I had read this article back then!

At Macadamian, we have had a world class user experience group in-house for the past few years. Learning to work with this new UX group was not an easy task for a primarily engineering and quality assurance company. It took more then a couple of months to work out the process for collaboration between UX and engineering. Everything Tim has discussed we have also learned, the hard way.

Being that I come from the engineering side of Macadamian, and that most of the costs of the project are on the engineering side of the project, the point that jumped out at me the most was the suggestion to listen to the concerns of the developers.

The first few combined projects between the engineering and UX group resulted in significant schedule delays and cost overruns on the engineering side due to really good, really cutting edge, and extremely difficult to implement designs coming out the UX group. When the estimates were created, the estimator put time in to basically add some form fields, text, and maybe a graphic or two. Pretty naive.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), the customer saw these designs, loved them, and then expected to get them for the same price as that form with 23 checkboxes and 97 form fields. The complexity and innovation required on the UX side was not expected on the fixed-bid engineering side.

To solve this problem, a simple (and in hindsight, obvious) process improvement was made. The developers had a chance to look over the designs prior to the customer seeing them. This allowed any potential design decisions that would adversely impact the schedule and cost to be caught, and fully discussed prior to the designs being approved by the customer. It wasn't that engineering had a veto over the design, it was allowing the usability group to be made aware of any potential technology challenges to be discussed earlier in the cycle.

This allowed the two groups to work closely together and solve any potential issues. Sometimes the UX folks were able to convince the developers of the critical nature of the particular design, and other times the user experience group came up with another solution that was just as usable, but much easier to implement. However, don't confuse this approach with one where technology drives what personas can and cannot do with the product, that would be a mistake. User needs have to drive the design.

Style over Usability: A recipe for annoyance

Clearly the person who designed this website is an artist. Too bad. Sure it's stylistic, urbane, chic, or whatever the kids are saying these days, but it is hard to use.

I did an informal round of user testing, no one could find the information for the schedule without prompting. Though many (tech guys) went "oh neat" when they realized the trick. This is beautify visuals, but poor design. Ohhh shiny is not a replacement for usability.

I dare you to try and find the show listings.

World Usability Day

It seems like everyone has a world day now-a-days, so why should usability be any different? Usability is certainly important.

How many times have you seen a door that confused you? A fire exit that opened inwards? A set of switches that didn't relate to anything you have ever seen before? What about a computer application that confused airbrushed metal and rounded corners with actual ease of use?

Usability is everywhere, it impacts everything in our lives, so, next time you see a friendly neighborhood usability person walking around, stop and give them a hug! They could use it, they have a hard job actually getting people to understand the importance of usability.

Macadamian and OCRI are holding an event in honor of World Usability Day, I will be there, will you?

When the need for UX expertise is all too clear

When I saw this I felt a great disturbance in the UX Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly clawed out their eyeballs. With apologies to Star Wars.

I was using a new piece of software the other day for my other "job", and when I launched a particular feature this lovely pop-up above came up much to my amusement and eventual annoyance.

There are so many things wrong with this dialog to really discuss in depth, but suffice it to say this dialog is launched every single time this feature is launched. Every. Single. Time. And the the question never changes.

In the workflow this pop-up is followed by another pop-up that intones an important message.

It is so important that they always show it. Every. Single. Time. In fact it is so important they even truncate the message so that it doesn't all show on the message box. So you don't even get to read the entire message! That's just how important it is. After all, you can't handle the truth.

With thousands of people being mandated by regulations to use this application I guess you don't need a good user experience. I mean, who likes their users to enjoy working anyway? End sarcasm.

For those of you who are dying to ask what happens when you hit "5", I did. And this was the result.

I kid you not. Seriously, I am not making this up. I am not allowed to make this up. And the admin dialog you get after this message box is still in English. And that admin dialog is still the same admin dialog you get if you answer correctly.

I am not sure what this is supposed to imply. :)