Recently UIE already announced their UX Immersion 2012 conference on Agile, now Jared Spool writes how 2012 is the year to face the challenges and opportunities of integrationg Agile and UX.
My favorite quotes:
"What started as a whisper in 2001 is now practically a force of nature: change is coming to the development process everywhere."
"Agile development is no longer a fad. It's the way people are getting software delivered."
"The biggest irony of the shift to Agile is that it's exactly what the UX world has been seeking for years. Yet now that it's here, we're wholly unprepared for it."
"At the core of Agile is the fast iteration, something we've known for decades produces better designs."
"Now that the tables have turned and the developers are ready to iterate quickly, our standard toolbox is wholly inadequate for the task."
"The Agile Manifesto values "working software over detailed documentation" and "responding to change over following a plan." In an Agile project, you can't just drop the deliverables on the table and move on."
"This year, we predict that we'll see a ton more UX professionals prototyping than ever before. This will become our silver bullet to getting to shared understanding fast."The opportunity here is for us to re-groove our tools to help developers understand what we're all trying to build and who we're trying to build it for."
"We've got some major challenges ahead of us. Yet the opportunities coming this year make it something we're really looking forward too."
Looking forward indeed. The complete article can be found online.
First post after abandoning this Weblog for almost a year. My day job as an Agile Product Owner took so much of my focus.
A lot has happened in the meanwhile. Agile UX is taking shape more and more and is being more widely embraced. There is a lot of new material appearing so I will try to restart posting resources here that I find around the internet here.
Starting with the following video which is a must see. It shows how Nordstrom Innovation labs builds an application in one week by interacting directly with their target users inside a shop for glasses.
“Startups are run by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs know everything. They don’t listen. A UX researcher would be frustrated.” That made me wonder… is there a class of startups where the entrepreneurs are eager to listen? and how could UX researchers be valuable in a startup?
The answers I found pointed to the lean startup movement.
Robin Dymond, a frequent commenter on the Agile Usability Yahoo group has written down his approach to Agile UX. Like many others have done before he advises to sketch UI designs ahead of the development team. He advises to work half a sprint ahead (not 1 sprint).
Recently I was asked to sell the domain name and got a very good offer. At that moment I didn't have any plans to stop this blog. On the other hand I haven't been updating it very often either. For a long time I've been indecisive about what I wanted to do with it.
Until now I've been mainly posting links to articles and presentations on the combination of Agile and UX posted elsewhere on the web. I haven't written much commentary of my own, at least less then I'd like to have. One of the reasons for that is that it wasn't clear for me what my audience was, what it should be or what I wanted it to be.
Now that I can sell this domain name I'm going to jump on the occasion and make some other changes:
The language will change to Dutch. It is my mother tongue and the language of my main audience.
Marius van Dam is currently working in the role of Product Owner in the mysterious 'Sales Layer' project at Tricode, the Netherlands.
Following the Agile (Scrum) process he tries to maximize the continuous delivery of value to his customer while also delivering a usable and enjoyable product to end users.
Any resources that he encounters around the web are listed in this website.
