I recently signed up for a YouTube account. Today, I scrolled down my profile page for the first time and got a virtual slap in the face when the following notice prominently slid into view:
Ouch! I have no friends? Yeah, well, you, I dunno… you’re UGLY, YouTube!
As more organizations adopt agile development methods, folks who practice the various disciplines related to user-centered design are forced to adapt. At the 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo on June 14, we heard one such story of adaptation from Christina Wood and Craig Miller, from the usability team at the local office of NCR.
Christina and Craig described the challenge of being “parachuted in” to support 30 applications in different stages of product development. They have found a successful model for integrating activities such as prototyping, but have lacked resources for proper usability testing. They are currently evaluating Morae, a usability testing tool from TechSmith, hoping that its time and cost savings might improve their ability to perform tests in an agile environment.
At last week’s 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo, Declan Whelan of Whelan & Associates talked about how to fit user experience/design/usability into an agile development process. I’ve had the pleasure of working as a UX designer with Declan on an extreme programming (XP) project and can vouch for his ideas: thanks to his leadership, that project boasted some impressive metrics in terms of productivity and code quality. Also, I was thrilled to find that most of the developers grew increasingly interested in front-end design issues, often challenging the wireframes or prototypes I delivered and following up with some clever suggestions. That level of teamwork really improved the quality of the product.
Declan provided the following summary of his 7-minute presentation, though I highly recommend you check out the video below so you can see him smoke through 55 slides in the allotted time. Woot!
I have a love/hate relationship with usability testing. I love the feedback it generates, but I hate the administrative make-busy work that surrounds it, especially when a test takes on a life of its own and becomes <shudder> an Event. When that happens, teams begin treating usability as an end in itself instead of as a design tool, its proper designation.
At last week’s 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo, I briefly introduced an exercise I’ve come to love called the design checkpoint. Design checkpoints are non-events. They are simple to prepare for, even simpler to conduct, and let designers sit down with customers to get useful feedback. In my talk’s title, I hint that checkpoints are an alternative to usability testing, but more accurately I see them as a complement. Checkpoints fill the gaps between usability tests — gaps that may otherwise feel more like gaping voids.
Despite a wide-ranging interest in personas (aka user profiles) by web and software designers, concrete examples of actual personas are surprisingly hard to find. So I’m happy to contribute an example here, from a chapter I wrote in the book User-Centered Design Stories. Click the thumbnails below for full-sized images, or download a printable PDF.
Here’s a bit of back story on our persona, Timothy Powell. Timothy is one of three personas I created to inform the design of a web application for a client called… well, the legal hurdles in identifying this particular client weren’t worth the effort, so let’s call them ClickDox. ClickDox had an idea that people would be willing to pay good money for a web application that lets them send and receive confidential documents online, as opposed to sending them by courier (too slow and expensive) or as email attachments (too insecure).
