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Announcing AgileUX New York City 2012!

Dec 25, ’11 6:00 PM


AgileUX NYC 2012 is a single day, single track conference about designing great user experiences within an agile development process. It will be held in New York City on a Saturday in February.

Overview

This conference is about how great experiences are designed and created within the structure of an agile development process.

This conference is for stakeholders, product managers and user experience designers passionate about building products that delight their customers, whether you work for a lean startup or a large organization. The day will focus on bringing thought leaders in the AgileUX community to cover the entire lifecycle of software development including organization and cultural change, team building, process design, customer research, design studio and transparent design, user story writing, pattern libraries and mid-stream rapid cadence usability testing. Attendees will walk away with a strong understanding of the complete lifecycle and practical methods they can use immediately.

The Program

The conference will consist of 8 x 35 minute sessions, and 5 x 8 minute talks. There will be approximately 45 minutes reserved for lunch with 2 15 minute breaks.

Speakers will be announced over the next 4 weeks.

Sign up here to get the latest information first.

You can also follow on twitter.

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Design Studio and Agile UX : Process and Pitfalls

Nov 10, ’11 10:51 AM

We are often asked how and when Design Studio should be used in a startup or enterprise whose product team embraces agile. We hope this article answers some questions about how to effectively use Design Studio (as well as variations on it), and to avoid potential pitfalls so those practicing some flavor of agile UX will be better armed to solve difficult problems in their work.

The description of Design Studio in The Design of Design Studio was meant to serve as the canonical example, and is best suited for the beginning of a significant series of projects focused around one theme, or a set of themes. The output of such a design studio session may span many iterations. There are, however, many variations of Design Studio that can be employed to good effect for the smaller problem spaces within agile processes. For example, a Scrum team may need to explore a more targeted problem space that they identify during iteration planning prior to a sprint.

This should not imply, however, that we use Design Studio during what is sometimes called “Iteration 0,” although there is no reason why it couldn’t be used then. We don’t happen to follow the “staggered sprints” model popularized by Desiree Sy and Lynn Miller at Autodesk. Instead, we solve problems as whole Scrum teams and bring the ideation, design, and development phases as close as possible to the same kickoff point so the concepts can inform story-gathering and estimation sessions.

Read the article on UXMagazine

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User Experience Design Articles – March 5, 2011

Mar 2, ’11 1:41 PM

Some here is a roundup of some interesting articles I stumbled upon and read this week. Some, like Whitney Hess’s have created quite a conversation in the UX community. Most are recent. Some just happened to be things that I came across that might be interesting to everyone.

Cheers,

SemanticWill

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Design Thinking Resources

Feb 28, ’11 7:39 PM

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The UX Canon: Essential Reading for the User Experience Designer

Aug 25, ’10 10:00 AM

For some time I had been slowly acquiring books, reviewing books, and recommending books to colleagues who were interested in “getting into” interaction design, user experience design, information architecture or usability. This eventually led to me cataloging my list of what I consider the best books in the field. With help from my friend Dave Malouf (co-founder of the IxDA and Professor of Interaction Design at SCAD), we edited this list of my canon, and now I want to share this list with you. If you have a question about a particular book, feel free to email me.

Next steps, besides slowly acquiring and reviewing more books, is to begin further classification of books. Until that can happen, this is my UX library. If I don’t own it or haven’t read it, it’s definitely not on this list. At the same time, there are books that I own that aren’t included because I thought they sucked for one reason or another. The fourth option is that I have it, have read it, liked it, but simply forgot to include it. So if you ask “Why haven’t you included X, Y, or Z – it’s one of those reasons.”

The Big UX Picture

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies by Ben Shneiderman

Core: Required Readings in User Experience Design

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper , Robert Reimann, David Cronin

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville

Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge

Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman

Introductions to UX

The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett

A Project Guide to UX: For user experience designers in the field or in the making by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design by Bill Buxton

Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices by Dan Saffer

Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko

Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology by Jonas Löwgren , Erik Stolterman

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design by Robert Hoekman Jr.

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web by Christina Wodtke

The Electronic Design Studio: Architectural Education in the Computer Era by Malcolm McCullough

Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing by Malcolm McCullough

Practice, Methods and Tactics in UX

Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown

The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web by Steve Mulder , Ziv Yaar

Design Research: Methods and Perspectives by Brenda Laurel and Peter Lunenfeld

Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design by Karen Holtzblat, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, Shelley Wood

Contextual Design : A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs by Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt

Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research by Mike Kuniavsky

User and Task Analysis for Interface Design by JoAnn T. Hackos, Ph.D , Janice C. Redish

The Persona Lifecycle : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design by John Pruitt , Tamara Adlin

Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction by Bonnie A. Nardi

Design Research: Methods and Perspectives by Brenda Laurel (Editor), Peter Lunenfeld

Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indy Young

Card Sorting: Design Usable Categories by Donna Spencer

Prototyping: A Practitioners Guide to Prototyping by Todd Zaki Warfel

Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder

Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville

Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell

Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone

Search Patterns: Design for Discovery by Peter Morville

Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation by Nathan Curtis

Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski

Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm

Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

User-Centered Website Development: A Human-Computer Interaction Approach by Daniel D. McCracken , Rosalee J. Wolfe , Jared M. Spool

Usability

Don’t Make Me Think: A common sense approach to web usability by Steve Krug

Human Factors in Information Systems: The Relationship Between User Interface Design and Human Performance by Jane M. Carey (Editor)

Web Usability: A User-Centered Design Approach by Jonathan Lazar

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines by Sanjay J. Koyani , Robert W. Bailey , Janice R. Nall

Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work by Tom Brinck , Darren Gergle , Scott D. Wood

Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests by Jeffrey Rubin

A Practical Guide to Usability Testing by Joseph S. Dumas , Janice C. Redish

Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen , Hoa Loranger

Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen

Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability by Luke Wroblewski

Web Site Usability (Interactive Technologies) by Jared Spool , Tara Scanlon , Carolyn Snyder , Terri DeAngelo

Visual Thinking & Info Viz

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition by Edward R. Tufte

Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte

Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward R. Tufte

Information Design by Robert Jacobson (Editor)

Information Graphics: Innovative Solutions in Contemporary Design by Peter Wildbur , Michael Burke

Visual Function: An Introduction to Information Design by Paul Mijksenaar

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Design Ethnography & Mood Maps

Aug 3, ’10 9:29 PM


Over the last years I have noticed that many books and articles talk about the usefulness (or not) of personas, delving a little into the actual production and design of the persona as well as defending it’s usage. Very few explicitly define some of the activities that occur within the design research phase. It was Jared Spool that mentioned the real value of personas being the actual process of engaging with users and developing empathy towards their circumstances and experience interacting with a product.1 The following article grew out of a conversation with Nathan Curtis of Eight Shapes (author of “Modular Web Design“) when I offered to contribute what I called a “Mood Map” to the Unify Documentation System. Let’s start.

You can read the entire article on Johnny Holland.

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