Josh Viney — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 23:35:16 GMT

“Keeping UX and development in synch assumes engineering and design are the same kind of work. This isn’t true. Holistic, contextualized user experiences require time to frame and synthesize the experience. This synthesis happens long before you can start coding features.”

Web Product Manager speaking here:

I absolutely agree that quality user experiences take time to frame, synthesize, and create. I wholeheartedly disagree that engineering and design are different kinds of work, and that synthesis must happen before code is written. It’s a product of old school engineering “measure twice, cut once” thinking. That just doesn’t apply on the Web.

We need to stop treating code like it’s an asset. When we stop seeing code as an asset, we can start to see developers as designers and manage them as such. No one freaks out when a designer throws away a prototype or produces multiple versions of an interface, but that’s not the same for developers. Both designers and developers do research, prototypes, tests, and iterations, and both are completely worthless on a tech project w/out the other. Doesn’t anyone else think it’s odd that we seldom hear Creative Directors debating project management process, but developers argue about it constantly?

So what do we do? Segregating design from development is at the heart of the problem, not the solution. I believe we need to treat developers like designers and get them involved in the process as early as possible. Have them work alongside designers while prototyping, commenting on technical feasibility, involved in user testing, and generally there synthesizing the experience. Then we let them code early and refactor often, and put the focus on the creation of features that make for quality user experiences instead of code as an asset. As for specific project management methodology to help keep stuff on track, it’s simple. Take some pointers from Scrum and let the folks doing the work give real input into timeframe and scope, then make them commit. I promise it’s much easier to get commitments from people who really understand what the goals of a product are than those who are fed designs and just told to build it.

That said, user experiences and product quality are not measured within the realm of project management methodologies or philosophies like Agile. Project management focuses on delivering projects on time w/ constraints like time, resources and scope. Creating something on time and w/in budget has little to do w/ whether or not the product is any good or should even have been built in the first place. Measuring user experience is specifically about quality product design. Something that, in many cases, can’t be known until well into the product lifecycle. Basically, quality UX is a goal and project management methodologies are there to manage the means.

Thinking and Making: Comments by Josh Viney