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I think the process of producing software is much more efficient if the designers (or those that contribute to the design) have a strong technical understanding of the medium. For instance, in designing a website it helps to understand what can be achieved via CSS because if you design things that can't be expressed with CSS and require images instead (or ...
26
Personally speaking, lean UX is not a type of UX strategy, it is more like the business strategy which accommodates the fundamental UX principles.
In UX Design you Design -> Prototype -> Validate as is, but when you do this in sync with other development units in the organization, it becomes lean UX.
Anyways, here are some of the links/books/what-have-you.
...
23
You've somewhat discovered the answer to your own question. The best time to include development in the design process depends on the development team you are working with.
Your initial intuition is correct...get the developers in sooner than later. Ideally, they are a part of the design process from the beginning. They have insights and ideas that can ...
22
If s/he's colouring in your wireframes then possibly you're providing them with too high a fidelity version. Try lowering the fidelity so that they have to put some interpretation into your wireframes while still respecting the IA requirements.
Here's my crude example of high vs. low fidelity wireframes.
/EDIT - Edited the mockup so it's not quite so ...
21
A user experience designer is a fantastic asset during the requirements and analysis phase, so you should hire one as soon as possible.
Part of requirements and analysis is determining what the product should do, possibly based on experience you've gained from the prior iteration. UX people are expertly trained to help out here. Their experience with user ...
20
The Sharing Mockups stage is too late
Assuming you want the developers fully engaged and understanding the reasoning behind the design and decisions made then you should have them in a UX Design Workshop - before mockups are done
In my typical workshop I'd
Explore related User Stories
Itemise concepts user will be thinking about
Do multiple UI ideas that ...
20
A portfolio is not simply a catalog of work you've done for previous companies. Here's a quick definition of a portfolio from Wikipedia:
Career portfolios serve as proof of one's skills, abilities, and potential in the future.
Does this include sample work for other companies? Of course. But there are issues with basing your entire portfolio on previous ...
19
Could working more collaboratively overcome some of this so that the visual designer gets to understand the thinking is behind the wireframe and, therefore, gets an understanding of what they are then able to add over and above the colour?
On reading your description of a wireframe it sounds very final with little room for interpretation. If you are in the ...
19
Mobile first means that you start your design process off by designing for mobile. Once you have that done, you can easily modify the design for pc.
The main reasoning behind this is that if you voluntarily constrain yourself to mobile, you will be forced to make decisions about what is really important, and what you need to focus on. By doing that, you ...
19
First things first
I don't think UX can succeed in this scenario. A sprint is too short to do both the design and execution of the same feature. You should be out in front of things with the Product Manager defining the work before it ever becomes an engineering request.
If you take that approach seriously (which I've never been able to realize 100%), you ...
17
There are 2 reasons I can think of:
Confirming an email address before letting them in.
Making it slightly easier for a new user to set up their autofill username + password while their password is fresh in their mind.
If you don't care about their email address, then I would log them straight in. See reddit's sign up process, for example.
There are ...
16
Of course we have to!
Well, maybe not technically understanding or knowing the actual syntax of the implementation of a feature, but we should understand and be aware of how much effort goes into implementing certain features. Good UX doesn't come cheap. It takes time to realize the design.
UX people are part of the driving force that makes key decisions ...
16
If you looking for different processes rather than methods, there are
User Centered Design / Goal Directed Design
Usability Engineering
Design Thinking
LeanUX / LeanStartup
Data (or Metrics) Driven Design
Open Innovation / Participatory Design
Lead User Design / Design-driven Innovation
Four of them did I examine for innovation capabilites in a past thread ...
14
UX, along with all of the other disciplines involved in your project, should be involved from day one. The team should strive to work in parallel with each other as much as possible. To achieve this, it is imperative that the UX resource(s) participate in all daily Agile rituals and meetings. This is especially true for backlog grooming and prioritization. ...
14
The Fussy Logic of Infinite Wicked Problems
Yes, it means all of what you say. There is no exact answer or way to know your solution is final.
A wicked problem is a problem that's impossible or difficult to solve because of contradictory, incomplete and changing requirements that are difficult to recognize.
The thing with design and Wicked Problems, is ...
13
This answer applies to most presentations, not just UX ones.
A good presentation is like a story, where you take your audience on the journey that you want them to experience. If you send the presentation to them ahead of time, you lose the ability to take them on that journey.
There are other potential negatives as well in that your audience may start ...
12
My response may be biased because I run a pure UX research, strategy and design firm, but as UX practitioners, we're involved in agile projects at the very beginning. As zsiberian stated, getting ahead of development by 1-2 sprints is the only way to keep the process agile. UX involvement in the iteration planning session allows the user story definition ...
12
My favourite illustration about design processes is the following:
Don't even care about where does it come from, it's the long-forgotten old-style software design (when there wasn't separate UX and technical design, there was software engineering, and engineering processes), but it still holds the key.
As you see, all start roughly at the beginning, but ...
11
Yes! To let the user test the registered username password combination.
Additionally we train the user how to sign in to our site. The next time the user visit our site, she/he know where to find sign in, and how it works.
When the user registers, she/he does it on free will to accomplish a task or access content. The motivation is high at that moment ...
11
An anecdotal perspective ...
On a couple of occasions, I've worked with supposed 'UX Experts' that know nothing of the implementation. In those cases my role was primarily as Creative Director but I found myself progressively taking on the UX role. The reason being, the expert didn't have the breadth of knowledge to push the experience beyond copy cat ...
11
A "Stopping Rule" is a mechanism for deciding whether to continue or stop a process on the basis of the present position and past events, and which will almost always lead to a decision to stop at some finite time.
The most obvious example I can think of would be the winning condition for a card game. In the game "snap", the game continues until only one ...
10
Mike Cohn provides a great template for user stories which is used throughout the industry.
As a type of user, I want some goal so that some reason.
As a customer, I want to pay my bill online so that I do not
have to mail it in.
As a developer, I want unit tests in place so that I can verify
my code is functional.
As an enterprise card holder, I want ...
10
Are they? Often, no.
Should they be? YES!
As should be content folks, product owners, project managers, marketing (as much as we loathe them), IT, customer support, etc.
In other words, the best UX is UX that permeates all teams involved with the project. I strongly believe that UX should be much more of a methodology and philosophy more than it should ...
10
Terms like "Functional Requirements document" are notoriously ambiguous and often misunderstood, especially when documents are being passed between design and development teams, so it's often best to define the purpose and scope of the document you are producing
Before you begin, to get agreement on the content and format
In the document itself, to avoid ...
9
Agile seems to come in a variety of flavors, but the theory is all the same, and based on that theory, UX is part of the mix from day 1...as is business line owners, customers, IT, marketing, etc.
I usually find the problem is when UX is still doing waterfall but dev is trying to go AGILE. Lots of UX teams still want to pump out piles of wireframes, which ...
9
It sounds like the core problem is understanding the fundamental concepts behind a low fidelity deliverable and high fidelity deliverable. Your visual designers think you're giving them a high fidelity deliverable, even if they don't intellectually know what that term means. If they don't, you need to teach them.
Sketches and Wireframes are automatically ...
9
User Experience and the design there of should consider all possible situations that the user may run into. This includes changes in the behavior of things, digital or not.
As an example I would like to mention the design of cars. A car changes behavior according to external factors, such as weather and of course aging. If the designer of the car didn’t ...
9
I think there needs to be more clarification on this concept in general. Even reading some of the comments so far I’m getting confused when UX within Agile is equated with Lean UX. There's a gap there that isn't really addressed in most content on the subject. And I imagine that's just because it's a challenge in general for which I'm not sure there's a ...
9
Hiring a UX designer is great first move: you focus on the user aspect, on his needs, on his behavior, on his expectations, as a website user, and not merely as a website viewer. That's a good decision. You're definitely not back to square one.
The UX designer showed you that you need to introduce a level of abstraction in your interface. Users don't care ...
9
I had very similar experiences to yours (and also been using JIRA for quite some time now).
It goes:
User stories are extremely limited
It seems that every Agile team fails to understand or work with user stories. But for a good reason - a user story capture only a tiny fraction of the problem domain, here's just a couple of things user stories don't ...
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