On Aug 29, 2009, at 11:03 PM, J. Ambrose Little wrote:
These two principles underly what is broadly known as Agile. And if you want an amorphous term, man, Agile beats UCD any day!
This made me chuckle. Having just come from the Agile09 conference w/ some 1500-1600 attendees, I can say first hand that the agile movements injection of the user into the process is more theory at the moment than practice.
Yes, they have user stories, but just because you put the term "user" into your process doesn't mean you're actually involving them. They write user stories that about a nebulous user. These stories are typically written by someone who isn't connected to a user at all.
This is one of the reasons they started a UX stage at the agile conference. This is one of the reasons why I gathered a team of 4 UX people to run a full day of UX workshops on Monday that fed into a joint venture with some agile developers to ship a product in just 3 days.
Yeah, we did an AgileUX project. We ran a full UX design process, from field research, to persona creation, to task analysis, to prototyping, to design and implementation and shipped in 3 days. If you want to see the webapp, just visit http://www.manoamano.org/ with an iPhone. It works with Android too, but there's a minor bug.
My point? Agile is a amorphous term if you don't tie it to the current Agile movement. For my money, I'd just use the amorphous term Design. Hell, that's actually the amorphous term I've been using for over a decade and will continue to use going forward.
Let me know when you guys get this argument worked out. In the mean time, I'm going to be Designing stuff.
Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel Principal Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. ---------------------------------- Contact Info Voice: (215) 825-7423 Email: [email protected] AIM: [email protected] Blog: http://toddwarfel.com Twitter: zakiwarfel ---------------------------------- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. ________________________________________________________________ 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
