Thinking and Making: Comments on stories by Austin Govella

Preston McCauley — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:00:52 GMT

THere are a few commentes I wanted to make that stirred some thoughts up in my head. Quick background: I’ve been doing UI design for almost 10 years now here are many things I have experienced.

1. What frequently happens when increasing a team’s literacy in a corporate environment is it’s extremely hard to do.

A smaller company or start-up this is practical and possible. In a larger enviornment I have found this next to impossible. People become extremely territorial. You have to be extremely patient to change the culture.

2. Trying to stay ahead of the sprint / development cycle from a UI perspective is a lot of hard work. This is especially true when non-technical and non-UI people can’t visualize a lower fidelity design – such as a paper prototype. I’ve resorted to hybrid proto-typing methods with interactive PDF’s and notations and physical demonstrations of these.

3. In several companies I have noticed teams of UI designers and a lead UI person to coordinate the overall design vision.

It becomes really hard to do this if you are the Only UI designer. Every design decision becomes increasingly complex and sometimes justifying your designed experience becomes a daily occurence.

4. Your developers not just the Product owners and UI designers must share the same vision. This is easy to say hard to do.

Jon Moore — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:03:24 GMT

An interesting question we often ask is: “would you launch this compared to what we currently have in production?”

Sometimes it’s enough to just be better than yourself. :)

Austin Govella — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:27:49 GMT

One thing I liked about when we did the exercise for our team is the way we couldn’t necessarily agree on an “Only”. That can be a useful insight, too.

Austin Govella — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:26:36 GMT

Thanks! I appreciate the kind words.

I actually came across your blog recently. Wish you wrote more.

Cindy McWilliams — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:16:55 GMT

I remember when we worked on an only statement for our team – there was so much debate! This post is a great intro to the use of this tool. It not only helps with definition but also with understanding the expectations of those involved with that product or organization.

I was a little surprised to see you drop the term “IA” from the statement so easily. I like to think it’s about working with information architectures in the context of user experience. I think a structural reference in this only statement is important for narrowing the focus.

I liked how you aligned content and services to the only statement in your last few paragraphs. That would make a nice visual.

amelia bellows — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:52:57 GMT

I like it! Its unexpected and fresh, and puts the main bit up top in that wonderful yellow band. Which actually is a fun AND functional way to present a content tidbit that gets you into the story. Your posts are quite funny, especially the one on Agile and the wireframes. Love fancast too, great work!

Michael Beavers — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:16:42 GMT

Thanks for the kind mention, Austin!

Austin Govella — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:51:19 GMT

Brian,

I totally agree on our primary goal as UX practitioners. If I seemed casual, that’s only because I don’t think the UX is the most important part of working on a team. I think the most important part is working well together.

Every one on the team makes compromises. Working well means everyone understands the best compromises to make. That’s why the team’s design literacy is so important.

Brian Friesen — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:17:48 GMT

There are always ways to fit user experience design into any process. Will it be “good” design is another matter.

Several statements in this article trouble me and almost take a very “casual” attitude toward the resulting quality of the user experience. Agile was developed as a method of cranking out software quickly for the sake of monetary gain, NOT for the benefit of those who would ultimately have to use it.

Can “good” user experience design reside in an Agile process? Yes and no. It’s all about the end goal of developing the software in the first place. Is the world a perfect place in which products are developed for purely altruistic purposes? No. But user experience design and user centered design techniques were created to make software easier to use, NOT faster to develop.

“Fast” is not necessarily “good” when it comes to the end user experience. The user does not know or care if software dev takes 15 days or 15 months however, they DO care if the software sucks.

Statements like “bumping lower-priority items off the sprint” sound good but what usually happens is that what gets”bumped” ends up being careful research and design thought and application of that thought.

As the Agile process continues to grow in popularity we, as user experience designers will need to find ways to incorporate best practices into that process. Austin Govella has done a great job of doing so in this article, however, we must not lose sight of the basic goals of why there are user experience designers and the most important element of creating software in the first place….the end user.

Masood Nasser — Mon, 19 May 2008 04:16:09 GMT

Austin: My 2 cents: Want to be more agile. Run. I have taken a bluetooth device and talk about my product experience while running with my son Rayhaan. The voice gets captured in a recording device and then we use tools to convert it to text.

Thus while running our concepts are finalized and our health improves. How's this for agile buddy:). Your posts are improving by leaps and bounds. Will spend more time here! The only "rule" I have for my team is to workout once a day apart from the "be an angel "guideline".

cheers
http://masoodnasser.blogpsot.com
http://artinthemake.blogspot.com

Masood Nasser — Mon, 19 May 2008 04:10:10 GMT

Harmony in life is achieved only when your life is an open book. No hidden secrets, no hidden fears, no hidden tensions no hidden tears!

cheers
http://masoodnasser.blogspot.com
http://artinthemake.blogspot.com

Austin Govella — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:27:44 GMT

”... my perception of social intimacy is entirely relative. I may feel (and truly believe) I am close to you and you may feel (and truly believe) that we are not close at all—Twitter seems to allow us both to live that reality.”

Wow. That’s totally true. And although tat occurs occasionally in real life, I think Twitter exacerbates that disconnect because it lacks a lot of the physical social contexts that we have in the physical world.

Indi Young — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:54:14 GMT

This makes sense! I’m always being asked, “How do you do UX in an agile environment?” My answer is always “Take time to model your users first, then get settled into cyclic design.” You say this with #1 and #2 above. The other four points all make sense from a team standpoint, as well, and I’m glad to be able to point people to them. Also, since modeling can take a long time, I offer several recommendations: study one user segment at a time, sketch the model based on shared knowledge, then test it with some real field work, etc. More on step 2 here: www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models.

Livia Labate — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:49:13 GMT

The ability to forgot is one of the most powerful things about Twitter. Not because Twitter actually forgets anything (it’s all there in the feed), but because we perceive it as if it does—out of sight, out of mind. That’s what makes it feel like a conversation and not a computer-mediated asynchronous communication tool.

What’s interesting is that there are ways to ‘remember’ (paginating back into history, retrieving favorited twitters, retrieving messages with hashtags, even googling a phrase if it’s indexed already). That’s actually quite a lot of ways to do that, but they are not front-and-center to the primary usage experience, which makes me think that Twitter is very elegantly designed to fulfill its primary use.

On your point about false sense of intimacy though, I don’t know if that’s really qualifiable as “false”, because my perception of social intimacy is entirely relative. I may feel (and truly believe) I am close to you and you may feel (and truly believe) that we are not close at all—Twitter seems to allow us both to live that reality. I think that’s a really fascinating aspect to how it mediate interactions/discourse.

Patrick C. Walsh — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:26:10 GMT

Recently came across Foucault’s social theory of panopticism which seems to be becoming reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism

This guy is living is living proof
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-06/ps_tra…

Austin Govella — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:38:41 GMT

Tanya, I didn’t even know the Second Life island was going to be active.

I think part of Twitter’s brilliance is how it easy it is to use it to create a virtual world around any other event.

Tanya Rabourn — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:41:08 GMT

Apparently the IA Summit island in Second Life was pretty deserted. I’d say it’s because the more active virtual world was Twitter. On the whole the conversation constructed a temporarily bounded but geographically unlimited world. There were definitely tweets from those not physically present in a session or even at the conference responding to tweets about a given presentation.

Josh Williams — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:54:07 GMT

Re: Twitter breeds a false sense of intimacy
I’m not sure, exactly, that it’s a sense of intimacy that’s at work. Maybe it is. But I think it could also be that Twitter just shares some attributes of those more familiar (intimate) relationships. Like, in a Venn Diagram, Twitter and relationships might overlap in the area where it’s OK to make digressive, uncontextualized, non-linear, apropos-of-nothing comments. And even in Twitter it’s possible to create contextual boundaries (for example: tweeting anything to #IASummit2008 is fine as long as you’re at the summit or tweeting about the summit, but non-summit related tweets after the summit would be plain weird).

Re: Twitter exposes the relative nature of phatic communication
There’s a cool, short article that calls Twitter “Social Proprioception” from Clive Thompson in this Wire article.

Austin Govella — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:43:52 GMT

Dude. Awesome insight. I think that begs the question: when we communicate in person, how much does our audience *really* affect what we say.

We assume it affects a lot, but maybe it doesn’t?

Christian Crumlish — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:32:30 GMT

Really good insights, Austin. I was just thinking about the quasi- two-way nature of Twitter. I tweet something without thinking too hard about who is going to read it, but I read tweets as if they were addressed to me.