At the postmortem dinner for the conference on sunday night. Myself & Greg Petroff when off on a debate about Agile being good or bad. I find it interesting that BOTH of our pre-eminent keynotes are both talking down agile, YET we as a UX community believe it is still valuable. Yikes! It screams to me the horrible influences we have been forced to assimilate towards (taking some of Bill's juices and running with it) around being under the thumb of engineering all these decades.
Through the discussion what became clear was that the term "waterfall" is associated with RUP (or RUP like processes) and for some reason is equated to "documentation". However, the meaning of waterfall to me means ... define before build as per Bill's discussion. Know what you are doing before you green light spending production dollars. What follows that design period does not need to be reams of useless and often mindless paper. On another point. I really disagree with this: > In fact, one of the core aspects of UX%u2014delivering > what the users need%u2014can be better assured through > agile process (IMO) . B/c I think it shows a lack of understanding to what UX is all about--telling a story. A lot of people have already highlighted "story telling" as a major theme of the conference and I couldn't agree more, but the way to creatively write a story, or create a drama, or event, is to do it through deconstruction. I never really understood what that meant till this conference, and this conversation, but for now at least, it means for me, that I create a vision and then deconstruct it through value statements and other criteria used to make choices. The example is ... The theatrical version of a movie vs. a director's cut. Almost always in process, the director's cut is made first and then it is cut down to fit the theater. If I just build in iterations, there is never a whole, guiding light or prototype from which I can cut away at. It seems that unless there is a distinct design phase where this visioning process can happen owned by design for design with collaboration and consultation from engineering and business, we are NOT *designing* user experiences, but just building them. Now, Agile development processes seem GREAT after designs are "green lighted". There are lots of advantages to engineers in those processes, but assimilating to them seems like a grave mistake at this point to me. - dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=25686 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
