Well put, Uday! The main thing that makes it work for our team is mutual respect and appreciating what the other side brings to the table.
For example, the developers have learned to appreciate personas and context scenarios because they reduce the amount of time wasted on arguing what "the user" would do. A concrete persona gives us a really clear idea of who that person *really *is so we can say, there's no way Julie would do that. End of story. Personas also protect the project from feature creep. We can put the kabosh on extra unnecessary bells and whistles that stakeholders ask for by explaining that, while that feature may be nifty, it's not something Julie would ever use. By the same token, I have leaned to appreciate the quick turn-around that an agile development process provides. The developers use use 2 week iteration cycles that happen continually in parallel wireframe and design phases. This lets us perform testing early enough in the project to make substantive design changes, when needed. Conversations are really important. Not only do they help clarify assumptions, dependencies, and expectations. They also set the tone of inter-discipline harmony. You never want to approach developers with an attitude of "I drew this design, now go code it." Involve them early on when you just starting research. While they're fixing bugs or working on other projects, I like to invite them to "collaborative check-in" meetings where I learn about what they're working on and share my research findings with them. Over time, the meetings allow me to introduce the personas that we'll be using for a project, and then we start talking about the data attributes and requirements that my research suggests. By the time I'm ready to make a wireframe, the developers already have context and more importantly, they feel that they've contributed to the decisions that have been made. I try to provide a wireframe as an artifact of design exploration. Typically it's hand-drawn sketches. Agile developers like this quick and dirty approach ;-) It's not until I'm in the design phase, working through my context scenarios that I start creating a pixel-perfect spec (to which developers, marketing, and QA all refer). By that time the developers have at least thought about, if not seriously jumped into creating the back-end to support the designs. And because I've spent so much time talking to them, I know the difference between what's possible and seriously do-able. Good luck and remember, mutual respect is the key. -Angel Anderson ________________________________________________________________ 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
