Design for Interaction

Agile UX Meetup Group

Last Wednesday I went to the Agile UX Meetup Group to hear James O’Brien (@sparrk) talk about his secrets of agile UX. It was a very interesting talk based on lots of work experience. Even though I don’t work in a fully agile environment at the moment, I felt there were lots of little tricks and processes that can make UX life easier. James’ presentation right here on Slideshare:

Some highlights that I personally found helpful:

Prepare to refactor
Organise your files for change, use patterns. There are many ways to do this, differing on the tools you use. Eg, if you’re using Fireworks, symbols are great, and most software will have similar tricks to use. Update the symbol document and all your instances will update automatically.

Use stubbed design

If I understand correctly stubs is a term from software development, where placeholders for features are used in code. To not get distracted in conversations with client and developers about page elements that haven’t been properly designed yet, James recommends to throw on a big STUB label.

UX debt
These are good enough solutions when you don’t have time for more and wireframes need to go out soon. You can stick your UX debt on the wall for later reference. This can be a great way to speed up your work when you need to, without losing track of UX solutions that can be improved.

Rethink deliverables
James suggest interactive deliverables to communicate all states and animations clearly. Even though there is no tool that really addresses this at the moment, I can imagine it’s easy to make a quick html page or template for this purpose. Especially on large projects. Interesting presentation he pointed to is Communicating and selling ux design deliverables by James Srutek.. Main advice there is to apply ux principles to deliverables: Make it visual, tell human stories not just show UI, engage your audience and speak the users’ language. And always have a short executive summary up your sleeve.

Think about UX deliverables as having 2 layers:

1. The idea (the what)
2. The presentation (the how)

Think more about ideas…

He mentions the CRAP principle for deliverables

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

Be available
When working with developers he also stressed it is very important to always be available for questions. Even when that means you can’t get into your workflow. If you have more then one ID working on a project that could mean you can divide mornings and afternoons, so either one is available, or in other words is ‘the sacrificial lamb’

A lot more was talked about, but for me these were the most interesting and helpful comments..

Follow James O’ Brien @sparrk