UIE Brainsparks

It’s easy for web applications to get overly complicated. Ideally, complex applications help their users solve complex problems, making their lives simpler. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case. Vague commands, useless dashboards, and confusing navigation create headaches for users by otherwise well-meaning applications. Often this can be a product of the structure of the application itself.

Hagan Rivers is a walking encyclopedia of web app design knowledge. A frequent speaker at our events, she has an amazing knack for making the highly complex digestible and easy to understand. Examining the structure of your application can reveal the places where your users struggle and provide you with opportunities.

In today’s UIEtips, we’re reprinting an interview that I had with Hagan about web application design. It was a fun discussion, talking about how she’s come up with the concepts, such as hubs, interviews, and her technique for diagramming the structure of web apps.

Read the article, Discovering Web App Structure: A Discussion with Hagan Rivers.

Hagan will also be bringing her expertise to an upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing Dashboards: The Do’s, Don’ts, and D’ohs!. She’ll show you a bunch of dashboards. And she’ll give you tips for helping stakeholders understand the implementation benefits and drawbacks of seemingly simple components, from graphs to customizable panels. You won’t want to miss it!

Dashboards are a great idea. The problem is, many are useless. In this seminar, Hagan Rivers will show you which elements to include, how to structure them, and what to slash out of your existing dashboard that needs some UX TLC. She’ll show you a bunch of dashboards. And she’ll give you tips for helping stakeholders understand the implementation benefits and drawbacks of seemingly simple components, from graphs to customizable panels.

Join us on February 23 for Designing Dashboards: The Do’s, Don’ts, and D’ohs! Designing a new UI? Evolving an existing one? You’ll walk away from this session knowing how to make your dashboard what it needs to be.

You’ll learn to:

• Determine what’s succeeding or failing in your dashboard
• Create a strategy for overhauling your dashboard
  or making a new one
• Prevent interaction pitfalls by focusing on tasks
• Design customizable dashboards that don’t suck

Whether you’ve got an onerous dashboard on your hands or you’re charged with designing a new one from scratch, then you simply can’t afford to miss Hagan’s practical and information-packed seminar on dashboard design.

[ Transcript Available ]

The goal of any site is for the right audience to find the right information. But beyond your actual content there are many things that can cause findability issues. These tend to be unanswered questions about your primary audience and whether or not you’re satisfying the need of that audience. Good information architecture can help guide your design decisions so that your users can effectively engage with your content.

Lou Rosenfeld offers up suggestions in his virtual seminar, 8 Better Practices for Great Information Architecture: Closing the Findability Gap. Lou believes information architecture offers long-term strategic value, and is more inclusive than some people may think. There wasn’t enough time to address all of the question during the seminar so Lou joins Adam Churchill to answer the remaining ones for this podcast.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…I spent a lot of time talking about the Zipf Distribution, which is basically a rule of many sites that a little goes a long way. Things like, a few of the search queries that people do on your site account for a huge proportion of all search activity. So a handful of queries needs to work well in order for search overall to work pretty well. Or, a handful of your documents are the ones that most people are going to be accessing, or are going to be accessing far more than any of the other documents.

So really not worrying so much about the long tail of the Zipf curve, but the short head. And once you have a sense of what that short head is, you can start working on smaller problems that, when you solve them, go a long way…”

Tune in to the podcast to hear Lou address these questions:

• Are there any special considerations regarding intranets?
• How many audiences can a website reasonably handle?
• Is there a distinction between engagement and involvement?
• Web analytics and UX tell us different things. How should you balance knowing when something is wrong versus why something is wrong?

How do you use information architecture to solve findability issues? Share your thoughts in our comments section.

Recorded: December, 2011
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Full Transcript.

Adam Churchill: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the SpoolCast. Lou Rosenfeld recently joined us for a virtual seminar entitled, 8 Better Practices for Great Information Architecture: Closing the Findability Gap. Now, the seminar yielded lots of good questions and comments, and we decided to have a follow-up conversation that we could make available as a podcast for you.

Now, Lou’s seminar spoke to new opportunities for information architects that add significant value to projects. We’re fortunate that Lou gives us a lot of time, and he’s graciously offered to come back and tackle some of the questions that he thought we could re-address from the seminar.

If you didn’t listen to this particular seminar, you can get access to the recording in UIE’s growing User Experience Training Library. There’s presently 80 recorded seminars there, all great topics from speakers like Lou from the world of Experience Design.

I wonder if that’s any coincidence that the two seminars Lou presented for us happened to be numbers 50 and 75 in our arsenal. Nice milestones for us, and with one of our favorite speakers. Hey Lou, welcome back.

Lou Rosenfeld: Thanks, Adam. I guess you’ll get me scheduled for number 100 pretty soon, right?

Adam: That would be awesome.

Lou: Excellent.

Adam: So, Lou, for those that weren’t with us in November for your presentation, can you share an overview with folks?

Lou: Sure thing. This sort of came out of a bit of frustration that I’ve felt the last couple of years that a lot of people see IA in a very limited sense, and don’t see it offering much long-term strategic value. I don’t think anything could be further from the truth.

So what I tried to do was at least map out eight directions that I called “better practices,” because I don’t think there are any such things as best practices in a field where nothing can ever be perfect. You can only make things better. But I laid out eight, and I’ll go through them really quickly right now.

One is just getting better at doing diagnostics, and I spent a lot of time talking about the Zipf Distribution, which is basically a rule of many sites that a little goes a long way. Things like, a few of the search queries that people do on your site account for a huge proportion of all search activity. So a handful of queries needs to work well in order for search overall to work pretty well. Or, a handful of your documents are the ones that most people are going to be accessing, or are going to be accessing far more than any of the other documents.

So really not worrying so much about the long tail of the Zipf curve, but the short head. And once you have a sense of what that short head is, you can start working on smaller problems that, when you solve them, go a long way. And I proposed something of a very simple rinse-and-repeat process for constantly diagnosing small things that have big impacts, and correcting for those and doing those on a regular basis.

That was the first one, maybe the most critical one. The second one, simply having better evidence, more balanced evidence. I trotted out one of my favorite diagrams, Christian Rohrer’s diagram of the landscape of user research, which breaks the methods we all know and love into four quadrants along two axes. One axis around attitudinal behavioral data, and the other around quantitative versus qualitative data.

What I’m simply suggesting is to be very careful not to do all of your research in one of those quadrants, to have balance across those four quadrants so that you have enough different blind men looking at the elephant and trying to get at true insight.

I talked a little bit about advocating on behalf of the long-term and the need to create anchors, things like missions and vision statements and elevator pitches, to counteract what many of us are dealing with in the trenches, which is constantly changing plans and directions, often due to ripple effects from management turnover and just things that are constantly reactive mode. We need anchors to stabilize our work so that our designs don’t go off the tracks and our teams don’t go off the tracks.

The fourth one was some thinking around measuring engagement and really looking at how we might do a better job of developing new metrics and ultimately better and new KPI around things that don’t have to do with clear cut conversions. How might we start thinking about developing metrics around engagement, around authority, around orientation?

Really around the stuff that I call “the metrics of in-between-ness,” the things that are beyond, again, those just sort of basic conversion measurements that we’ve been doing for years. Because there are more to our sites than the conversions. There are all kinds of other things that need to have to happen in order for people to have a good experience.

The next two, the fifth and sixth, are really areas of information architecture especially that people don’t think about and aren’t investing nearly enough, and in which there are fantastic opportunities. Those two areas are better contextual navigation within our deep content, and better search, especially across silos.

A lot of people think of IA as top down navigation. They talk about IA and search, which is wrong. IA includes any kind of finding. So I proposed a bunch of ideas around investing in contextual navigation, specifically things like content or domain modeling, as well as some ideas around improving search, especially taking advantage of opportunities both in how we allow people to enter searches through the search UIs that are involved both initially and through refinement, as well as the design of search results.

And then the last two, seven and eight. Seven was combining design approaches effectively, basically looking at opportunities to have better hybrids of what robots will do for us, things like search engines, that can do certain things really well, and what humans can do for us manually, things like best bet selection, and how you might put these types of things together in more effective ways than we typically do right now.

Finally, the last one, number eight, was around just remembering that things change, and that your design, your information architecture specifically, must respond to those changes. Looking at things like seasonality as a driver for how we present and organize information, how that type of thing can be formed by data. Looking, again, at how things are constantly changing in terms of users’ needs, and being able to respond effectively to those changing needs.

So that’s my nutshell version of those eight better practices for findability.

Adam: I love that concept, the metrics of in-between-ness. That was a great part of the seminar for me. Louise wants to know if you have any special considerations or approaches in regards to this closing the findability gap, in regards to her effort looking at their company-wide Intranet?

Lou: That was a really good question, and I hope I do a better job with it this time. We’ll see. Intranets are kind of an interesting animal in that so much of what they’re there for is to help connect people with expertise and to be part of a broader ecosystem. In other words, most intranets fail because there are easier ways to move information around, primarily things like email and sending documents as attachments, and overriding the hope for benefits of putting a canonical version of any particular document in one place that everyone can find.

Core information architecture is one of the reasons people bypass intranets and move information through other means that are less effective when it comes to things like version control. So they’re a slightly different thing. They’re part of these bigger systems, and there’s also other parts of these environments that go beyond HTML, things like CRM systems and so forth.

So, intranets, still, you’re going to find a lot of the same diagnostics are useful. You’re still going to see a Zipf Distribution for things like what content is being used most frequently. But you’re also going to have to look in other places, like are there certain types of our staff directory or our CRM system that are being used most frequently? Are certain tasks that span those different technologies, and how can we make those bubble up to the surface?

So the same things really apply, except that information architects who work on intranets are even more challenged in terms of integration. It’s not just integrating content, it’s integrating systems that house different types of content. It’s also integrating people and making sure that the systems don’t get in the way of the actual human connection. Because, again, a lot of times people want to find other people in their organization who have some sort of expertise, and that’s the killer app of the intranet.

So, again, I think a lot of the same things apply, but there’s often more silos to deal with, more fragmentation, and that creates just a bunch of new challenges for information architects. Also, a lot of great opportunity. So, if you are confounded and pulling your hair out of your head, I would flip it around and say, “Hey, you’ve got a great opportunity facing you.”

Adam: Kristin wanted to know, how many audiences a website can reasonably handle?

Lou: Well, I wish Kristin was on the phone, because I’d make her define reasonable. Reasonably, I’ll hazard a guess of three to five, and even that might be generous. My thinking goes back to Zipf, again, this idea that maybe there’s one or two audiences that are hugely critical. And then there are secondary audiences, maybe even tertiary that don’t get that same level of treatment, but get some form of treatment. So if you’re an academic website, those audiences might be students, people considering applying and considering being students, and staff and faculty.

So that’s three or maybe four audiences, and you have to really consider what their common needs are for each audience. What does each audience want? What are the tasks they need to accomplish? What are the things they need in terms of information needs that need to be satisfied? That’s sort of the high-level treatment where you might invest a lot of manual effort for each of these audiences.

But then, I think secondary audiences for an academic website might be the media, it might be alumni. It might be academics from other institutions. You may not have the resources to scale up so much manual effort for those folks, but you can still give them maybe a lighter treatment. Maybe less customized information for each audience, but maybe a single page that basically gives the lay of the land of the web environment for each of those audiences.

And then maybe tertiary audiences, I can’t just really think of off the top of my head, but those folks, you don’t do anything for them other than give them the straight robot-handled forms of access. Hey folks, we don’t know who you are. We don’t know if you’re that important, but you can use our search engine and you could use our very basic site hierarchy to navigate the site. Good luck, and let us know if we can help you. So that kind of tiered approach is what I think makes sense.

Now, the math, you know, is it one audience, two audiences that gets that Rolls-Royce treatment, is going to be very much dependent on how many resources you have at your disposal. So it all becomes an issue of scalability. But at least if you tease it into different tiers, now you don’t have to treat every audience the same way and feel the pressure to give every audience the Rolls-Royce treatment.

Adam: Luke wants to know if you draw a distinction between engagement and involvement. In other words, the example he offers up is that, he may interact with a power company’s site very intensely because he’s upset, he’s got no power, but he’s not necessarily engaged. Can you just say a bit about that?

Lou: Well, yeah, I think that’s a great example. I think what I had said in the presentation was, our goal ultimately is to design not experiences, but design for engagement. In other words, to give people an opportunity to engage with us in conversation and dialogue, and to feel ownership of that dialogue. In other words, not have our web environments just be sort of this way to project a one-way monologue to people, but to give them a way to talk with us. So we listen as well as we talk, and as much as we can to give them a sense of ownership about conversation, about the service itself, and what we may be providing.

Luke’s example is great, because it’s like well, my power company makes me angry. So I’m very involved with their website, but not in a positive way. Well, again, I would look at that as an opportunity to create something positive. I know as a retailer at Rosenfeld Media every time we have a negative customers experience, and there’s not that many, but when we do we can usually win people over and give them a sense to at least make them happy, to take lemons and make it into lemonade.

But ultimately, what can we do when we have their attention? Can we help them? Can we give them something? Can we give them something that might give them a reason to come back in a way that makes them feel like they’ve dealt with a human, and they’ve been listened to and that they have certainly a better impression that might pave the way for a future engagement?

The power company, you know, if you look at that example, yes, who would ever want to engage with a power company? Well, most of us probably would. If we have a better sense of being listened to and engaging in a dialogue with the power company, we might be willing to let the power company know that there’s a problem that might be affecting the community, and might be willing to be on the lookout for issues that would be helpful to them.

We might be willing if they give us the opportunity to report on their level of customer service, how helpful, how gruff are the people they send out into the field? What would we like them to do in terms of alternative energy? They may be doing lots of surveys, but what about direct feedback? Hey, I would be willing to put solar cells in my roof, and I would be willing to spend this amount of money to do so. Those are the kinds of conversations that those companies aren’t very good at having, but probably really would benefit from.

So even the power company should be — not can be — but should be designed for engagement. And often a negative interaction might be the doorway to a longer-term and more positive form of engagement.

Adam: Lou, one of the things that came up during the seminar I thought was fairly valuable, I wanted you to say a bit more about it, and it was this. That with web analytics alone, we know something’s not working, but we may not know why. With UX alone, we may know why but not necessarily know whether it’s working or not.

Lou: That’s right. This goes back to the second point I made about doing balanced user research, and having essentially a balanced set of evidence to use to drive your decision making. I mean, ultimately that’s what we do is we’re making decisions and we need evidence to make those decisions well. That’s what design is ultimately about, and when we have a balanced set of inputs, a balanced set of types of research, what that does is, if it’s balanced we not only get a better picture, but the sum is greater than the parts. We get just better insight overall at whatever problem we’re trying to solve, whatever we’re trying to accomplish.

So, I think there’s a lot of interesting dichotomies in the work that’s done inside most organizations that haven’t necessarily put together things like web analytics and user research. In fact, I believe I presented a slide about all those different dichotomies in the presentation people are welcome to look at. But one of them is, what versus why? So here you have all these people in one part of the organization. Maybe in one silo, maybe they’re associated with Omniture, whatever it might be. They’re the web analytics team, whatever you call them. But I have all this really rich stuff that describes what is going on based on behavioral data.

Now, if you’re on the user research team and doing task analysis, which is a totally different thing, might you want to know something about the common information needs that come out of web analytics to influence the type of task analysis work you’re going to pursue? Because that’s expensive work, and it would be really good if you had some foundation that was based on behavioral data to help you shape that agenda for task analysis.

So there’s a nice kind of complementary nature of, hey, you know, we user researchers, we’re really good at figuring out things are they way they are. We can do this sort of attitudinal research. We can talk to people, we can observe them, we can have them think out loud. But what are the good questions that we should be checking out with users in doing those studies? Well, can we go back to the data to help shape that agenda? It’s just, again, one example of how these things can come together so that the sum is greater than the parts.

And there’s a whole host of not only examples, but more importantly, opportunities. I think the organizations that figure out how to combine what are currently siloed and all these organically-evolved pockets of research and put those together in ways that are optimized from making insights are going to ultimately make good decisions. And that’s really what I’m trying to get at there.

Adam: Well, this was awesome, Lou. Thanks for circling back with us.

Lou: My pleasure.

Adam: For those listening in, thanks for your support of the UIE Virtual Seminar Program.

Seats for the premiere Agile development and mobile design conference are going fast

We started out with 100 spots, but already we’re down to 80 for the UX Immersion 2012 Conference in Portland, OR April 23-25.

You can register at the lowest rate of $1,349 to secure one of the remaining 80 spots. After these spots are gone, the price increases by $300.

We’re not surprised at how fast these spots are going. Once you see the full-day workshop topics and amazing speakers, you’ll want to grab your own spot.

Spend 3 intensive days devouring the latest UX techniques in 2 important areas: Agile development and mobile design.

The goodies that come with your registration

• Two full-day workshops: You’ll choose among 3 Agile and 3 mobile design focused workshops
• One day of Featured Talks: Hear from each of the workshop presenters, 2 case study presentations, and a keynote from our very own Jared M. Spool
• Complete conference materials: We’ll send you the PDFs of every talk and workshop just before you leave for the conference
• Recordings of the Featured Talks: After the conference you can relive every Featured Talk at your office with your entire team

Learn more about UX Immersion 2012

Save your seat before they’re gone

Now is the time to act. Register now and we’ll guarantee you get into the workshops of your choice. You’ll get to choose your workshops at the end of February.

$1,349 is the lowest possible price. Don’t miss it.

New can be very scary. It’s easy to get comfortable with what we know, only to have everything turned topsy-turvy when we encounter major changes.

The world of mobile design is new, and therefore, scary for many. The comforts of designing for the desktop disappear when we have to deal with these portable, tiny devices. Even the way we design – the processes and techniques we’ve honed over many years of practice – suddenly doesn’t work the same. We need to think about our work in new ways. Very scary.

Yet this scary new world also brings tremendous opportunity. Thanks to the pioneers in this space, there’s a new appreciation for the value of design. That new appreciation gives us room to rejigger the broken parts of how we’ve designed in the past. And that’s really exciting.

In this week’s UIEtips, I explore both the scary and the exciting that comes with mobile design. Join me as I look at four areas where designers will face challenges and opportunities in the coming year.

Read the article: UX & Mobile Design – 2012′s Challenges and Opportunities.

If you’re facing these mobile design challenges and opportunities, then you’re in for a real treat. We’ve just announced our new spring conference: UX Immersion 2012, which has a focus on creating great mobile designs. You’ll want to consider one or two of the in-depth, full-day workshops by Rachel Hinman, Luke Wroblewski, or James Robertson. These folks will help you overcome the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities. See the entire UX Immersion program.

How are you dealing with the challenges of mobile design? How have you taken advantage of the opportunities? Leave your thoughts below.

Peer into Your Future

You’re about to see a project we’ve been working on for several months. A brand new conference bringing the newest, most critical thinking around two separate and important topics: mobile design and Agile development.

These experts will dive deep and get to the nitty-gritty details that will make you a stronger and more valuable UX Pro.

Agile Process

• Hugh Beyer – UX Design Inside Agile Development
• Jeff Gothelf – Lean UX: A Radical Approach to Integrating Design into Agile
• Dave McFarland – Demystifying jQuery for Agile Prototyping

Mobile Design

• Rachel Hinman – Creating Great Mobile User Experiences
• Luke Wroblewski – A Detailed Look at Designing Mobile Inputs
• James Robertson – Innovative Mobile Intranet Designs for Your Enterprise

Get First Dibs on a Seat When You Become a VIP

There are only 100 specially priced $1,349 spots available for the 3-day UX Immersion Conference. One of them can be yours.

VIPs will receive a special link to access registration on Monday, January 30. Everyone else will have to wait until Tuesday night to save their spot.

So be sure to get on the VIP list and start exploring the UX Immersion Conference.

[ Transcript Available ]

A common trap in designing data visualizations is focusing on all the different ways to represent the data, rather than the questions that the data should answer. The presentation of a data set is pointless if it’s not useful, usable, or if people can’t understand it. With so much data to choose from how do you keep the goal of the visualization in mind? How are you sure you’re telling the right story?

We turn to Noah Iliinsky when it comes to data visualization. He is the co-author of Designing Data Visualizations and co-editor of Beautiful Visualization. Drawing from cognitive psychology, Noah explains that there is both an art and science to designing data visualizations. Aspects of shape, color, and placement all play into our brain’s ability to process the data being presented.

With the idea of placement in mind, it helps to think of the constraints and boundaries of your visualization. Careful consideration of its landscape prevents you from ending up with a “hairball” of data. Putting meaning behind placement helps the layout of the data but also conveys greater knowledge about it.

Noah and Jared Spool discuss creating data visualizations in this podcast. And you won’t want to miss Noah’s virtual seminar, Telling the Right Story with Data Visualizations, on Thursday, February 2.

As always we love to hear your thoughts. Please share with us in our comments section.

Recorded: January, 2012
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Full Transcript.

Jared Spool: Welcome, everyone. On today’s SpoolCast, we have with us the fabulous Noah Iliinsky, who is doing a virtual seminar for us here at UIE on February 2, called “Telling the Right Story with Data Visualization.” He is also the recent author of “Designing Data Visualizations,” his second book with his co-author Julie Steele. And today he’s going to talk to us about how you get into projects where you’ve got massive visualizations.

Noah, welcome.

Noah Iliinsky: Hi, Jared. Thanks for having me.

Jared: I am so happy to be talking to you again. It’s so much fun. So, you and I were talking before we got on the air here about this project you have, connecting all the dots between the musicians of Seattle. Tell me a little bit about this project.

Noah: This is a website—people can go check it out right now—called SeattleBandMap.com. This is the “before” state. We’ll be releasing the “after” in a couple of weeks. And, as like so many projects, it started without a real clear plan or design. It was some people in Seattle starting to draw on the kitchen table—well, probably on a napkin—starting to draw the links between the various bands in Seattle, bands that had musicians that had played in one band and then went onto the other band and bands that had recorded albums together and that sort of thing. Seattle’s got a pretty hopping music scene, and the map got pretty big. At one point, they did a poster-size version of it, and they had a large, banner-size version printed.

But the map continues to grow; new bands, obviously, are created all the time. And so they’ve been growing this map. And of course, now there’s an online version, at SeattleBandMap.com. And what it is right now is just a collection of about, I think we’ve got 3,700 or 3,800 bands on this map, and a little hairline link between each band that has shared a member or played on an album together, that sort of thing.

Jared: Yeah, I’m looking at it right now. It looks like a case of bad acne or a Lichtenstein picture, something that’d be hanging up in MoMA.

Noah: Yeah. This is an example of what we in the industry refer to as a “hairball.”

Jared: Yeah, it looks like it. What makes it a hairball?

Noah: Well so, and this happens, by the way, a lot of the time. This is not unique to this project. This is sort of a classic result of people start a visualization with some data, and their goal is “Let’s visualize the data.” Which isn’t, it turns out, actually a goal. It’s a process. So they have created a visualization, naively, and this is not a bad thing, but they didn’t have very specific goals in mind for what information they wanted to reveal. What I’m doing with this project is I’ve come in to help them redesign, specifically, the look and behavior of this network visualization to make it more constructive, more useful, easier to get information from.

One of the difficulties that they’re having right now is that they don’t really have a lot of information represented, and so this is a little bit paradoxical. But if we represent a little more information, it’ll add some more constraints to this visualization.

So right now, all they have is bands and connections between bands. And I guess there’s sort of a third encoding, where the dots are a little bit bigger if the bands have more connections. But there’s very little else represented here in terms of any number of the other things that you can think of that might pertain to the meta information about a band. There’s nothing here about total number of members. There’s nothing here about how many albums the band recorded or how many shows they played, the overall lifespan of the band, genre, is this a band that started in Seattle or it started somewhere else and moved to Seattle.

Because there’s not a scope on this particular data set, it has crept to bands that were never Seattle bands. So the Beatles are on here and Johnny Cash is on here, because at some point somebody from Pearl Jam or something played on a group album with somebody else. And so the network has sort of crept over this initial concept. And none of these are tragic. None of these are fatal flaws. It’s just a reflection of what happens when you don’t have a more well defined goal in mind.

Jared: Right, right. And I’m guessing there’s a bunch of misinformation here, too. Like, these lines have different lengths, but does line length actually mean anything.

Noah: It really doesn’t, as far as I can tell, in this generation. I don’t actually know what the placement algorithm is for this. I think it’s relatively arbitrary. There may be a little force-direct thing going on here, where the clumps get clumped a little tighter. But the point is it’s not even relevant if there is an algorithm there if the humans who are meant to be learning from it can’t understand what those meanings are, so it may as well not exist.

Jared: Right, right. And I’m also seeing, there are places where there are multiple lines. There seem to be lines that go through objects and through points, bands, I guess, and then lines that actually terminate at a band, and it’s not clear whether, in fact, there’s always a connection to the band it goes through or if it’s just an accident that the line just happened to intersect with the dot.

Noah: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of ambiguity here.

Jared: Yeah, because it doesn’t go through the center. I’m looking at the band Memes, and there’s lines that go through on the edges and lines that go through on the center, and it’s crazy. Someone’s going to get hurt. [laughs]

Noah: Yeah. This is a dangerous network here.

Jared: It is. It is. OK. You’re not just critiquing this. You’re actually involved in the next generation, right?

Noah: Yeah. I’m designing what this next-generation diagram is going to look like, this network diagram. And I’m also, then, going to create it. I’m going to build it in code. So I have the accountability there of not just being able to wave my hands and say, “Here’s how it should be,” but then it’s up to me to make that actually happen.

Jared: I’m really intrigued now, right? Because I wouldn’t even begin to know how you get started on a project like this. Well, first, give me a little history. How’d they suck you into it? You didn’t just bump in on the street and say, “Oh my gosh, you have a visualization problem. Let me help you.”

Noah: No, not like that. No. It was sort of the other way around. It was a woman who’s a UX designer, who is friends with the people who run the band map, works for a professional acquaintance of mine. And I don’t know how it came up with them, but I got an email saying, “Friends of mine need some help with a visualization, a network visualization in Seattle. Is this something you might be interested in helping out with?” And so the introduction was made. And of course, it’s a fascinating project and it’s a fun project, so I absolutely was excited to work on it. And so I said, “Sure, I can do that. Piece of cake.” And here we are.

Jared: This is obviously very rich, and there are all these connections and all these bands. How does the data look on the back end? Have you looked at that yet?

Noah: I haven’t looked at the raw data. We have another friend of mine who’s working on the database angle of things, and so she’s exported samples of the data and exported versions of the data set for me and that I need to do the design with.

I haven’t seen the complete, unadulterated, raw data set. It’s mostly been user-submitted and user-validated. So I think they believe that the quality is very good, but the completeness of it may not be as complete as they would like. And they fully intend to allow this to be a site that people can add data to, whether they’re musicians or fans or whoever, and certainly allow bands to come in and, for example, put in links to their Wikipedia page, put in links to their MySpace page or the band’s home site. So you find a band on here that’s maybe connected to other bands you like, and you can click through and see when they’re playing or download some tracks or something.

Jared: That’s interesting that you sort of jumped right into the use cases. That’s really critical in terms of understanding how to visualize the data. I’m guessing you really have to start with “How will someone want to use this?” Right?

Noah: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a little bit of a flaw. Well, this is evidenced by they just started with “Let’s show some data.” And they didn’t say, “Let’s show a particular kind of data,” or “Let’s show data to a particular audience who has a particular interest.” It’s just “Let’s show some data.” And the problem with that approach is that it leaves you a little unfocused. You are less well guided towards particular solutions, and it’s hard to tell when you get there.

So, something that we’ve been discussing in these conversations around this website is what are the sorts of information that people who come to this website are going to be interested in? So, for example, I listed off earlier things like which instrument does each musician play and how many albums did each band release. And a lot of this information is not, probably, going to be represented on this website, because there’s other ways to get it. You can go to the band’s website and look at all their albums, or you can go to their Wikipedia page, or you can go to AllMusic, or there’s any number of ways to get that information from the world, and so that doesn’t need to be a strength that we need to duplicate.

Instead, the goal here is to focus on things that are not well-represented by these other resources, which is to say, show me the network of which musicians have played together in which bands and how those bands are then linked. And that’s a very different perspective that you can’t easily get from any of the other resources that are out there now, so that’s the real strength that this offering has and that we’re trying to focus on.

So that changes, of course, things like the data that we’re going to choose and how we’re going to choose to visually represent the data that we include, because we’re telling a different story than “Here’s all the Seattle bass players for the last 50 years and who they’ve played with” or “Here’s just a timeline of the punk scene in Seattle.” Those are different, more-focused questions. And instead, we’re looking at this greater sort of network, specifically, and less about some of the details that we could.

Jared: That’s interesting to me. It feels like a trap. And this makes perfect sense to me. Tell me if I got this right. There’s a trap that teams fall into, which is they are so neck-deep in all the data they have that if they say, “Oh, we’re going to come up with an interesting way to visualize all this data,” they just start thinking about, “What are all the ways I could represent the data?” But they’re not asking the question, “What are all the questions that our audience wants answered?” to prioritize that data in a way that gets them there, and so they end up, like anything else, building out a lot of functionality that is neat but not useful.

Noah: Yeah, it is exactly that trap, and it’s the trap that UX professionals typically are familiar with, because they’ve seen it happen and are then hired to solve or hired to keep from happening in the first place. And it’s something that I bring to data visualization that I think is a relatively uncommon perspective. Not to say that nobody does it, and clearly there’s a lot of capable and smart data vis practitioners who think deeply about what the goal of their visualization is. But when you look at the whole world of stuff that’s been visualized, a lot of it is, “We had some data, so we graphed it.”

Jared: Yeah. [laughs]

Noah: Or, “We had a lot of data, and check it out: we got it all on the page, all at once.” And that’s really exciting, and it’s kind of fun, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t necessarily solve anybody’s problem or answer anybody’s questions. I find design constraints kind of useful and interesting, because they cause you to think about the problems in ways that you wouldn’t have caused when you have total freedom of expression. And for me, that sort of requirement that constrains what’s possible actually makes me think in more creative ways about what we can do with it.

So, for example, looking at this hairball, I’m a big proponent of axes, because thinking about the landscape of your visualization, the boundaries of your map, axes kind of define the whole world. And if you don’t have them, you kind of get a hairball. There’s nothing that says, “This band should be over here and that band should be over there.” And so it’s difficult to extract meaning from the placement; in fact, there is no meaning in the placement here. And so, if you can make placement meaningful, you’ve now conveyed a lot more knowledge about these bands, and you don’t have to label each band.

So one thing I was thinking of, in terms of what would be some interesting data that would also, for example, help with this layout problem a little bit, and I thought of the time line. So, each band here is a dot, but what if you had a horizontal time line of the last 30 or 40 or 50 years of bands in Seattle, and each band, instead of being a dot, was more of a lozenge, right?

Jared: Oh, OK.

Noah: A band that was around from 1997 to 2002 would have a little length of about five years, and that’s a useful thing and certainly tells you some information about the band. But it also, in the grand scheme of things, gives an enormous coherence to the layout, where now you can look at the bands that were around in the ’60s and the ’70s and the ’80s and the ’90s and see how that evolved. You can say, “I just want to see the bands that were active between 1989 and 1992,” if you’re looking for the birth of the grunge scene.

And it gives you a lot of information. It makes the information you have on the screen more accessible. It organizes it more. So it’s a paradoxical example of how adding more data to the screen can make it easier to find the data that you’re looking for. Now, maybe I’ve created some use cases that didn’t necessarily exist, but that’s OK, in the sense that we are creating an interface that facilitates more use cases that are possible with this particular interface.

And so, rather than saying, well, if we added a little date stamp next to each band names in this map, it would become harder to see everything but wouldn’t actually add a lot of value. It wouldn’t be any easier to extract the information. But when you use that extra, the addition of more data—in this case, time frame—as a constraint, you actually are now molding the data into a shape that’s easier to understand.

Jared: That makes perfect sense to me. What I like about it is that, for me, it’d be really helpful if there were a couple bands that I really liked and I had a sense of their time. I’d be able to see when they happened and who might have influenced whom and what connections they had in terms of the players between them.

And it also helps because, last New Year’s, not this past one but the previous one, I went to a film festival, and one of the films they showed was of the Boston bar scene. And there were all these bands from the ’70s that I’d forgotten about that were in this documentary that was put together. And I could see how long each of those bands lasted and how much they have influenced bands that I like today from the local scene, and even possibly from the national scene. And that information would be really interesting to me, because I hadn’t thought about those bands in years, and I could see, if I had that explorer, I would have these moments and go, “Oh! I remember loving those dudes. What happened to them?”

Noah: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And also, being able to trace the lineage of, “Oh, there’s a particular musician,” and “Oh, I didn’t realize that they were in these other bands, and that’s why they kind of sound the same, or that’s why I like…” It gives a whole context, in a way that these isolated little dots on the screen don’t reveal in the same way.

Jared: So it feels to me like there’s this iterative process where, like everything else, you sort of give yourself this constraint—in this case, it’s the timeline thing. And then you say, “OK, what use cases could we design for?” And then you start to ask, “Are those important use cases? Are they not important use cases?” And then you turn back and say, “Well, OK, if they’re important use cases, what might that design look like? What might other constraints that lend themselves to those use cases be?”

Noah: Yes, exactly. And this sort of iteration, it almost doesn’t matter where in that loop you begin, in terms of, “Are we starting with a use case? Are we starting with a design constraint?” It almost doesn’t matter which of those you start with, as long as you do iterate through and you end up with a coherent set that includes some use cases that are hopefully based in reality that are actually going to be useful to your customers. And also includes the right data being revealed to satisfy those use cases, and then eventually involves a design that can be constructed with that data and, again, continues to satisfy those use cases.

Certainly, there are situations where you don’t really know enough about your customer but you’ve got a good sense of the data and you can kind of think, “What are the interesting relationships in the data?” even if I don’t exactly know what my customer is looking for. And there are some times when you have the luxury of saying, “We know exactly what information we’re looking for. I’m going to go to my infinite data reserve and pull that data down.”

So there are situations where, if you want to graph all the census data, for example, versus employment or income, the data is out there in the world, and if you want to cross-reference those, you can probably go find it. So you can sort of assume that the data’s available in some situations and really focus on what are your use cases, or you can say, “We have some of the constraints. Let’s go from there.” But yeah, at the end of the day, you get a set of data, design, use case that kind of go together and hopefully produce something of value at the end.

Jared: Given this, it feels to me like this is actually very similar to designing anything else. There’s nothing special here. You know, here at UIE, we’ve divided up how people make design decisions into different categories, and one of the categories is self-design. So, if I needed this data myself, I could design this for me and I could look at the use cases that I would need, and as long as the rest of my audience has the same sort of needs that I have, that would turn out to be a pretty useful design.

But there’s another type of design, which we call activity-focused design, which would be how you would go out and actually research what those use cases would be. But the methods that we use to research those use cases probably aren’t any different when we’re designing for data visualizations than when we’re designing any other application, right?

Noah: Yeah, I totally agree. In fact, I consider the work that I do, the data-visualization work that I do to be a subset of user-experience work. I’m still designing experiences. I’m still designing interfaces. They just happen to be particularly focused around visualization and the visual conveyance of knowledge rather than forms and drop-downs and scrollbars and panes. And of course, I wrap those things around the data visualizations sometimes. But this does feel like, absolutely, a similar related sub-discipline that just happens to have a product that’s a little more focused.

That’s all for the first portion. And the second portion of designing a data visualization is actually taking the different dimensions of data that you have and choosing, “What do we represent with that axis? What do we represent with color? What do we represent with shape? What do we represent with size?” And that whole second half of the process we haven’t even touched on yet in this conversation, and that’s a whole specialty, another art and science into itself. And there’s definitely both art and science aspects to that phase of the design.

Jared: Yeah. But again, that feels very familiar to me with other parts of UX, right? Because if I’m laying out a form or I’m coming up with a workflow for my users in an application, I still have that sort of mix of art and science. Some of it is just based on my experience and things that I know that have worked well in the past I can draw from that. Based on inspirations I get from other people’s designs, I can draw from that. Based on experimentations that I do and prototypes I build and say, “Oh, that didn’t work so well. Let’s try that again,” I can get inspired or get data from that.

So it’s the same, right? It’s the same sort of thing, except you’re just working with a different toolbox, as it were.

Noah: Yeah, yeah. I think so. I will say, in one aspect, we have pretty good science behind a lot of data visualization in that there’s been a lot of research, in the field of cognitive psychology, there’s been a lot of research in how do people perceive different colors, how do people perceive the meaning of shapes, how do people perceive the meaning of placement? And so there are some well-established, measured, scientifically valid reasons to say, “Use color for this; don’t use color for that,” “Shape is good for these things; shape is not good for those things.”

And so it is treated a lot like an art, but you can burrow underneath that art and you can go back and read the research that explains why so many people use color for categories, for example. It’s great for categories, and we perceive it really excellently in a categorical fashion. And color’s actually not very good for showing quantities. You can use brightness or intensity for quantities, but cycling through the rainbow is actually a poor choice for showing quantities. We can show the studies that measure that as well and talk about why the brain just is never going to be very good at that. It’s not because we’re stupid or we’re from a different culture; it’s because that’s just not what we’re wired for.

And so there really is solid scientific foundations behind all this, which really can make or break a visualization, because there are ways to take certain kinds of data and encode it with encodings that are not very compatible with the shape of that data.

So, if I’m trying to show really fine-grain differences in numbers, trying to represent those with colors is very difficult. When you’re trying to differentiate between a couple of shades of light blue and decide which one is how much darker than the others, that’s a very challenging task that our brains are just not very good at. Whereas if you want to do that with position, you can tell the difference between 34 and 37 on a 100-point scale. If you’ve got a bar graph, you can see, “Well, this one’s 34 and that one’s 37, and look, a 37 one’s clearly longer.” Our brains are very well suited to seeing that difference and quantifying it and understanding it.

And so there is a science underneath all of it, where you can make well-informed choices that will lead you to a design that is easier for people, easier for your customers to understand and get good knowledge from.

Jared: You and Julie do a fabulous job of walking through that stuff in the “Designing Data Visualizations” book. That’s what you’re going to be talking about at the virtual seminar, too, right?

Noah: Yeah. The virtual seminar is actually going to be not quite a literal page-by-page walk through that book. But we’re going to follow the process in that book, starting with a data set, and we’re going to talk through and demonstrate each of those phases; the deciding what to visualize; picking out data that supports that particular story that we’ve decided is relevant. And then, once we’ve selected the data to tell that story with, going through the process of applying visual properties—placement, shape, color, size, all these things—applying these to the different data dimensions, so that what we get is a visualization that actually tells a story and reveals the knowledge that we want to reveal.

Jared: The process that you went through with the Seattle Bands Map stuff, that’s a very typical process that a lot of folks will go through, right? In terms of, “We have all this data, we have to think about the use cases, and then we’re going to apply what we know about good data visualization to pick colors and shapes and all that stuff.” Like any other UX thing, once you realize what the tools you have to work with are, it’s not an overwhelming, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy” thing. It’s, “No, I can get my head around this,” type activity.

Noah: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s exactly the goal of the book, and ideally the goal of the seminar, is to give people a handle on the process, give them enough of a framework and sort of a step-by-step process that they can approach these problems and understand that success is possible. And in fact, it’s a fairly deterministic thing. If you go through these steps, you’re not guaranteed of a beautiful visualization, but your likelihood of creating something that is incredible and successful goes way up, above and beyond most of what you see on the Internet, a lot of which is just sort of, you know, shots in the dark.

Jared: Yeah. I’m really excited to see what you’re going to do with this Seattle Band Maps thing, because it has a lot of potential and it would be really cool, but I completely see how it’s, at this point, in that stage of, “We have a lot of data. Let’s plot it in two dimensions with different-colored dots and then connect lines to them.”

Noah: Yeah. And to be fair to them, and anybody else who’s working with data, this whole process that we’ve been talking about, in some ways, has to come after you already have explored the data a little bit. And you’ve already spent some time doing messy things with the data and you’ve spent some time understanding, “This data set would look very different if most bands had 10 connections versus a data set where most bands have two connections.” And so, understanding the density of the data, and what are the time frames we’re dealing with, and how many bands are we talking about, how many musicians are we talking about, how many connections are we talking about.

You do kind of have to muck around with it. Maybe in a private way, maybe not out in public, but you do kind of have to muck around with it, to get a sense of what it is that you’re dealing with. Because what happens—and I’ve certainly had this experience myself—is somebody says, “Well, we have some data.” And your first thought is, “Oh, well, here’s a great way to visualize it.” And then it turns out that the data is incomplete. Or it’s too big to do effectively with that visualization. Or the patterns you hoped were going to be revealed aren’t really there, or it turns out that 90 percent or 95 percent of your data all looks the same and there’s only a few on the edge that are kind of interesting.

You can only do so much design in the abstract before you start to look at the reality of the data, and you’ve got to just kind of muck around and prototype a little bit. As you do with other kinds of interface design, you’ve got to prototype a little bit and see if your understanding or your conception of what you think you have is actually supported by the reality of what you really have and what you have to deal with.

Jared: You have to really build into your process a chance to do some really fast iterations with the data, so you can just get a feel for what it could be.

Noah: Yeah, get a feel for what it could be. And I’ve certainly found that, even when I had a pretty good sense of what I wanted to build, as soon as I got the data into a tool that allowed me to manipulate it a little bit, I started having some more ideas about what was possible, or I started running into some constraints that I didn’t know existed.

And so, yeah, you’re definitely going to want to leave room in your schedule and your budget, certainly, but also leave room in your headspace for “This initial design that I have in mind isn’t the be-all and end-all or the end answer. It’s a starting place. And then we’re going to let the data and the technology and other constraints that we haven’t even thought of yet drive our understanding and drive our process. So that, at the end of the day, we will end up with something that is closer to the reality than we started out with when we had ideas but weren’t as intimately connected to the reality of what we’re working with.”

Jared: I’m going to bet, once you get it in front of users who aren’t you, other things come up, like they say, “Oh! I wonder if I could do X.” And then suddenly you’re thinking, “Well, we could, but we just didn’t build that.”

Noah: Yeah. Right. “Come back for the next version.”

Jared: [laughs]

Noah: For sure, for sure. Actually, one thing I really like about collaborating with different people and different teams on data visualizations is they are the domain experts. And so I’ll come in and say, “How about a visualization like this?” And they say, “Well, that’s not going to show this other thing that we’re interested in looking at,” and they start to describe something else. And so, then if I sketch that or bring that to them, they say, “Oh, we didn’t even think of that aspect.”

And so you get this sort of back-and-forth that’s really well supported by having different points of view and different experiences with the data. You get this back-and-forth where people with different levels of exposure are going to have different ideas, and as they bring those ideas, the commonality of those ideas are going to surprise and inspire other people on the team. It’s a really nice thing to do collaboratively because you get more insight and more ideas than any individual’s ever going to get by themselves.

Jared: So I’m comforted by this thought, that designing great data visualizations is not too far different than designing other types of great user experiences. The big difference is that you’ve got this different set of tools because you’ve got this space and this graphic elements of it, and so you have to understand how size and color and distance and connectivity and all those axes, all those different elements play together. But once you’ve mastered those things and you really get a handle on them, this is pretty much familiar territory.

Noah: Yeah, that’s right. I think the goal for a lot of design processes is to boil down the fundamental process so that you’re not tripping over yourself just getting the process right. And it allows you to, instead, spend that brainpower and that effort creating the interesting aspects for this experience, for this data set, that make it really unique and really compelling, rather than struggling just to get the fundamentals in place.

Jared: That sounds excellent. Well, I’m really looking forward to the virtual seminar, where I’m going to get a chance to learn what those things are and to get a chance to give the book a thorough reading. Thanks so much, Noah, for joining us today and talking about all this.

Noah: Thanks very much for having me, Jared. I’m looking forward to doing the seminar.

Jared: For those of you who want to attend the seminar, you can find out about it at uie.com. It’s “Telling the Right Story with Data Visualization.” Just come and click on the link that says “Virtual Seminars.” It’ll take you right to it. That’ll be on February 2, with Noah Iliinsky. And the book, “Designing Data Visualizations,” published by O’Reilly, you can get it at all your favorite book-buying spots. It’s a nice, wonderful book with Noah and Julie Steele.

Noah, thank you again for spending the time with us.

Noah: Thanks, Jared.

Jared: And I want to thank our audience for listening in today. As always, thank you for encouraging our behavior. We’ll talk to you next time. Take care.

In the last two years, the UX world has seen some drastic changes. Our designs, and the processes to get to them, are undergoing a transformation that forces UX designers to rethink what they do.

Users’ behaviors change based on how they view digital content. The desktop computer is no longer the norm for reading content and conducting web interactions. As a designer you must think about designing for the plethora of mobile devices now available. It’s not a question of whether to consider mobile design, it’s a matter of actually planning and implementing it now.

And how we communicate our designs is shifting. Agile threw a wrench into wireframes and the solid set of deliverables that would serve as a contract. More and more, design teams are testing out the idea of a collaborative journey where design and development are working together in short sprints.

However, one major core UX principle has not changed: put the user first, think about who they are and what they need, and build to their tasks.

3 Intense Days to Make You a Stronger UX Pro

We thought about all of this when we were putting together the UX Immersion Conference 2012 – Agile/Mobile happening in Portland, OR, April 23-25, 2012. Our vision for this event is to bring the newest, most critical thinking around two separate and important topics: mobile design and the Agile process. We’re not presenting brief introductions and sending everyone on their way. We want UX pros to get an in-depth understanding of what’s new and what’s changing.

We’ve carefully designed the UX Immersion program to get you completely up to speed on where we are in these new worlds. You’ll learn the latest techniques for dealing with a UX process in an Agile environment. You’ll discover what it takes to build usable, useful, and delightful mobile apps that work within the ever-changing standards.

We’ve assembled an amazing team of leading-edge thinkers on these new forces. These folks have been pioneering these areas. They are the thought-leaders that everyone goes to for the tough problems. And, importantly, they are excellent teachers who can make a day of this material really fun and engaging. Who are they? You’ll find out really soon.

Get on the VIP List

Later this week, the UX Immersion 2012 – Agile/Mobile web site will launch. On January 30, registration will open exclusively to those on the VIP list (believe me, you want to be be on the VIP list). These folks will get the first shot at the 100 seats available at the lowest conference price. Starting at 5:00 pm, January 31, we open registration to everyone.

Become a VIP by signing up for the UX Immersion email list. As a VIP you’re guaranteed the lowest conference price, a conference gift, and other special perks. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest conference updates and news.

We’ll see you in Portland in April.

There’s definitely an advantage to having your users understand data and messages through a picture versus reading a series of sentences. Information visualization, when done right, can have a greater impact.

In many ways, data visualization will take a message and make it more succinct. A good visualization can simplify the most complicated data, and often provide an interactive component with the user that a string of words can’t accomplish. The right data visualization will save the user time and provide a better experience.

In today’s UIEtips, Noah Iliinsky explores what makes data visualization so interesting. You might be surprised that biology has something to do with it.

Read the article, Why Visualization.

If you’re looking to tell a story through visualization, you’ll want to join us for Noah’s upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar on Thursday, February 2. Noah will show you how to choose an appropriate story for visualization then how to tell it. Learn more about his seminar.

[ Transcript Available ]

The goal of Lean UX is to take the focus of user-centered design off of documentation and put it squarely on the experience. The way to do this is to view any design idea as a hypothesis. With a focus on the experience, you can validate or invalidate this hypothesis much quicker. The sooner you reach this validation, the sooner you can focus on designing and building the correct solution.

Jeff Gothelf is a firm believer in the Lean UX process. One of the key aspects of Lean UX is how collaborative it is. Jeff says that the separation between design and development really needs to be broken down. That the people who are collaboratively building this experience or product need to be collaborating with each other much more frequently. Jeff discussed the idea of Lean UX in his virtual seminar, Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business, and the audience posed a number of great questions.

In this podcast, Jeff and Adam Churchill address the questions that there wasn’t time for during the live seminar.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…The core of Lean UX is bringing dev and design into the same time frame. That’s what we’re focusing on now.

To do it successfully, there’s an amount of upfront thinking, at the very least, that’s done by the product and design teams before we plan the next iteration.

There’s a little bit of heads up that says here are the things that we’re likely going to be working on in the next iteration. Let’s do at least a little bit of thinking around that. If there needs to be a little bit of illustration or visualization of that thinking, then it’s very, very lightweight.

It could be a sketch on a piece of paper, it could be a very rough wireframe. We’ve gone into iteration planning meetings where we’ve drawn on the whiteboard and said here’s how we’re thinking about solving this problem.

That engages the entire team in a low-fidelity way of articulating how they think the problem should be solved. Because it’s a sketch or it’s a whiteboard drawing it’s erasable. People can write over it. You can redraw it. You can redo it. That encourages collaborative problem solving…”

Tune in to the podcast to hear Jeff answer these questions:

• How do you validate with the engineering team what they’re going to need before the project starts?
• Does Lean UX require new tools or skills?
• Does the UX team build the wireframes or is it the developers?
• Does Lean UX work for larger, legacy organizations?
• What can you do if you don’t have access to your end users for testing?
• Where does user research fit into this process?
• How do you overcome expectations for wireframes that are already set?
• Does the Lean UX process reduce the number of hours spent on a design?

Do you have experience with Lean UX? Share your thoughts in our comments section.

Recorded: December, 2011
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Full Transcript.

Adam Churchill: Welcome to the SpoolCast everyone. Jeff Gothelf recently stepped away from his busy role as the Director of User Experience at TheLadders.com and joined us for a virtual seminar, Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business.

We know Lean UX is an important topic and, quite frankly, one that some folks are still trying to get their head around.

We had lots of good questions and comments during the seminar. We decided to have a follow-up conversation that we knew we could make available as a podcast for you.

Jeff has graciously offered to come back and tackle some of the questions that we didn’t get to address and some of the ones we thought were worth talking about again.

If you didn’t get to listen to this particular seminar you can get access to the recording in UIE’s growing User Experience Training Library.

Right now we’ve presently got over 80 recorded seminars from wonderful topic experts just like Jeff giving you the tips and techniques you need to create great design. Hello, Jeff, welcome back.

Jeff Gothelf: Hi. It’s great to be here.

Adam: Jeff, for the people who weren’t with us for your seminar earlier in the month can you give us an overview of what they missed?

Jeff: Sure. We talked about this idea of Lean UX. Really it’s a way to rethink about the way user-centered design is being done by taking focus off of the documentation.

Instead of the end goal of the design phase of any project being an actual document that describes an experience and focusing more on getting to that experience as quickly as possible to validate your designs.

The idea was any design idea, any user experience focus of a project is initially a hypothesis, regardless of how experienced you are or how much subject matter expertise you have.

You have a hypothesis about how to solve a particular business problem. And so the sooner that you can validate or invalidate that hypothesis, the sooner you can be designing and building the right experience, the right product for your customers and your business.

The focus is taking user experience design practices, taking a look at the entire toolkit, and figuring out which tools to use at the right time and at the right depth.

Now in addition to that, it’s about taking those tools, using them at the right time and at the right depth, and collaborating much more openly and much more frequently with the team that you’re actually building the product with: with developers, with product managers, with QA, stakeholders, and subject matter experts and really building this culture of shared understanding of where the project is going, where the product is heading, so that as much parallel work can take place.

In other words, instead of waiting for the IA to finish their work and the interaction designer to finish their work and hand it off to the visual designer who then hands it off to the developers to build, how much of that process can happen collaboratively and how much can happen in a parallel track?

That’s a lot of what we talked about is different techniques and ways to work more collaboratively as a team with UX design driving a lot of that focus.

Adam: Great. Let’s get to some of those questions. John wanted to know how do you validate with the engineering team what they’re going to need before the project starts and during the project do you need to circle back with them? Is it enough?

Jeff: That’s exactly what I meant by collaborative. This separation of dev and design really needs to break down as much as possible.

The project teams that are working together to build a particular product or a particular experience need to be collaborating much more regularly and much more frequently.

That’s really what this whole Lean UX idea is about. It’s about designers reaching out and saying, here’s what I’m working on, here’s the direction that I’m heading in, here’s some lightweight ideas.

I want to get your feedback and I want you to know what I’m thinking well before the pixels are dry on the page, if you will.

By maintaining this active conversation, by engaging the other members of the team, especially engineering, in the design phase, in the user research, in the stakeholder meetings they’re always aware of where the project is, what changes are being made, why those changes are being made.

Their dependency on UX as a maker of documents so that they can do their work diminishes greatly just by having that open air of conversation and collaboration.

Adam: If you’re going to be good at Lean UX are there new tools or skills that you need?

Jeff: I think the main skill that you need is the ability to collaborate and to have frequent conversations with your team.

And that potentially is a new skill in that there’s a certain comfort for a designer to be handed a particular problem and for them to go off and sit behind their monitor for a period of time, whether that’s a day or a week or a month, and then come out and say, “OK. I’ve solved it. Here it is.”

The different skill is to be proactive about the direction of the solution of the design that the UX person is creating and to do that much earlier in the process.

You have to get up, you have to get out, you have to circulate your ideas in what perhaps historically would have been seen as an unfinished form of the design and is now indicative of the type of direction that you’d actually like to head in.

By sharing those early and often you’re building that culture, that transparency, into the design process and with that transparency comes trust.

The one new skill, I would guess, beyond obviously all the other UX skills we already have, is proactive communication. If you’re not doing that today I would say that’s key to the success of Lean UX.

Adam: There were certainly some folks that were curious as to how things get done at TheLadders.com. One of the questions was who tends to build the prototypes there? Is it the UX team or is it the developers?

Jeff: It is almost exclusively the UX team. We use whatever tools we are either comfortable with, and that varies from person to person, or whatever is available to us in the time that we have to create those prototypes.

Occasionally we will test live code that’s in production with users and of course then it’s not necessarily a prototype, that’s actual production ready code.

But for the most part it’s the user experience team working either in markup, in HTML or CSS, in Fireworks in the past, we’ve even done some Flash prototypes, and we’re experimenting with some new and different tools these days.

Adam: There was a question that was in the seminar but I think we agreed it made sense to circle back on. The team at Piehead made the comment that it seems like a Lean iterative process works really well for small or new clients but maybe not so for larger clients like big, corporate systems. They were looking for your thoughts on that.

Jeff: So, I tend to disagree with that. I think the Lean UX approach can work on any size project in any environment.

One thing, though, there’s definitely a lot more upfront work that needs to get done in these larger legacy environments.

I actually wrote a blog post about this on my blog, which I’ve got at jeffgothelf.com, called “Lean UX Let Me Down”.

Which was, we took on a legacy project, perhaps overzealously, and didn’t dig into the existing systems and the architectures that were affecting the piece of the experience that we were there to fix.

As we peeled back the layers of that onion, the scope of the project grew and grew and the pitfalls and the different directions we had to go to fix things really came back to bite us.

So yes, I think it can definitely work in larger, more legacy projects but the goal would be to get a very clear sense of what’s affected by the piece of the project that you’re currently working on.

You really need to get a sense of the entire system, perhaps at a high level, and ensure that when you’re digging in with these rapid iterations there aren’t other pieces of the application that you’re breaking.

Adam: Jeff, one of the things I know you and your team do pretty religiously is that every week you’re talking to and watching your users with your product. Shaw wants to know what to do when you can’t get at your end users.

Jeff: That’s a great question. If you have no access to the end customer the best thing you can do is launch software quickly and iteratively.

Now obviously you need to be in an environment where that’s possible. If you can get software out into the marketplace quickly, or at least into a beta test, at least you have people using your ideas and you’re getting quantitative feedback on what you’ve put out there and how well it’s working.

At least you get a sense of what people are doing with it and if they’re actually succeeding at whatever it is that that particular experience was supposed to solve.

You need to do that regardless of whether you have access to your end customers or not but that provides the quantitative feedback and some insight.

Ultimately, if you don’t have specific access to a person if you can put surveys on the site itself or in the experience that allow the customers to actually reach back out to you via those mechanisms, anything you can put in that gives customers some sort of an opportunity to give you that some of that feedback.

But ultimately their usage would be really helpful.

Adam: I guess a related question, let’s get you to say more about that. Jerome wanted to know where you place user research in this process.

Jeff: We place it as often as possible. We found a system that works well for us where we test every week. For us it’s on Thursdays, it’s Thursday mornings, and we bring three users in every Thursday.

We run multiple teams so what happens is that testing that happens on Thursday is not unique to any particular team. There’s not one team that owns the testing that week.

That is usability testing for the week and if you have something to test regardless of what team you’re on you can bring your material to that test on Thursday.

Obviously, we do plan that a bit in advance and make sure the test plan is written out at least a day in advance and that there is a decent flow to the script that we have with the participants on Thursday, but that is a shared resource that happens every week and that anyone can hop on as necessary to validate their thinking.

Adam: How do you overcome already set expectations for wireframes?

Jeff: There’s two ways. It’s qualitative feedback, so every Thursday you’ve got people looking at the experience and they’re giving you feedback on something.

With a short video snippet or a usability report you can show that this is working or this is not working. We thought this was a good idea and this was not a good idea.

Qualitative feedback, in other words, usability testing, is one way, especially if you’re doing it often.

If you’ve got a regular track of communicating qualitative feedback to the organization. Even if you designed a wireframe on Monday if it bombs in the user test on Thursday you’ve got that feedback to get right back to it.

The other is quantitative insight and to say we’ve set these expectations, we’ve actually built this, and we’ve got people using the product and there’s data coming in saying that people are succeeding with this or people are not succeeding with this.

What we initially thought was a good idea is actually failing in the marketplace. We want to iterate on that. So it’s really customer validation is the key to continually improving and encouraging an evolving point of view on what the right experience should be.

Adam: Sarah’s looking for a little bit of insight on what Lean UX does to man hours. Does it actually decrease the number of hours you spend on a design when you’re using Lean UX or do you use the same number of hours just in a more collaborative or productive way?

Jeff: So it definitely does not decrease the amount of work or the amount of hours you’re spending. It just simply distributes the time more evenly over the course of a project’s life cycle, whether that’s in iteration or a design phase or however your process works within your organization.

It just distributes those hours in a different way. Whereas traditionally in a waterfall, gated process design was heavily, heavily concentrated upfront.

What you’re doing is you’re taking the heavy concentration and you’re distributing those hours across the entire project life cycle.

Adam: Ty asks a question and so I don’t butcher it I’m going to ask it exactly the way he wrote it. At scale, multiple teams of developers, product people, designers, et cetera, is there a greater risk of inconsistency in interaction patterns or brand application?

Is there a mechanism built in to protect this or is it a lesser consideration because this is really small? Again, that assumption that it’s for small teams or in start-ups.

Jeff: Yes. Great question. The short answer to the first half is yes, there’s absolutely a risk of inconsistencies and different patterns being applied and different approaches to solving the same problems manifesting themselves in the experience.

That is absolutely a risk, especially if you’re running multiple teams across a product suite like we do.

I’ve found two very effective ways to mitigate this particular problem. The first is having a centralized user experience team. What I mean by that is there is a UX team. Now, that team my be distributed out to individual Scrum teams if you’re an Agile environment or individual project teams if you’re in a Waterfall environment but there’s a home base for the UX team to come back together.

They have weekly meetings, they share knowledge, they share project work, and they show each other, they’re constantly talking to each other and sharing what they’re working on and how they’re solving the particular challenges that they’re facing.

That can happen on an ad hoc basis, it can happen on a very formal basis in a weekly UX team meeting where there’s work sharing and that kind of thing. That works really well as a knowledge sharing, kind of an informal solution to this.

A more formal solution is to codify a lot of these patterns in a style guide or pattern library or a component library where that is readily available to the entire organization so that if one team has solved how to do sign-up forms that is saved in a particular online environment.

It provides people with the ability to go and see how one team solved it and to take that UI and to take that code and to plug it into the pieces that make sense in their particular project.

That should evolve and grow as people change those solutions but that should always be the first place someone goes when they have to go build an experience or a product that uses existing components.

We’ve developed that at The Ladders and that’s worked very, very well for us as a centralized hub and a starting point from which to maintain a consistent user experience across our entire product suite.

Adam: Jeff, tell us more about the participants that you have in those weekly tests. How do you do the recruiting, where do you get them, where do you get these folks? Do they come from a pool of users or customers? Are you rotating through the same folks? Tell us about that.

Jeff: We work through a two-sided ecosystem. We have job seekers and we have recruiters. The first decision we need to make is who we’re bringing in this week and we typically make that decision on Mondays and we’ll decide if we’re bringing in job seekers or recruiters.

The next thing is we’ll ask what are we testing this week. If there are improvements to existing work flows we will likely dig into our existing user base.

So whether that is a set of recruiters or a set of job seekers, and we’ll make certain determinations based on the type of individual that we need to get in there to use the product that we’re currently designing.

For example, we could say we’d like to bring in folks from the Midwest who earn $50,000 to $75,000 and work in the tech sector, for example. That could be something we decide to do.

At that point we could say we need existing customers or new customers. Now, we won’t actually fly those folks into New York into our offices. We may do remote testing or we may just do phone calls with them.

Even in New York we’re grateful for the large population there and create those segments very, very quickly.

Then we decide whether or not we want to bring in external users or people who are already familiar with the product to see if we’ve made improvements.

That really depends on what we’re testing that particular week. We source those individuals, again, either from our member logs, we can create those queries and pull those usernames from our databases, or if we’re looking for external folks we’ll go to an external recruiter.

Our external recruiter, we can hand her a list of our names or we can ask her to provide non-Ladders members who fit this particular demographic profile or psychographic profile.

We use an external recruiter. She does all of the recruiting, the scheduling, the make-up, the finding folks when somebody bails on a particular session.

For us, given that our action designers do the usability testing at The Ladders, that takes a significant amount of work load off of their plate and we’re happy to have that external vendor provide us with that particular service.

Adam: Carolyn poses a problem that I suspect a lot of folks run into. She says they’re having a hard time integrating UX practices into their Agile approach and planning even with Lean UX in mind.

So she asks the question is there a way you found to be possible without having disconnected design sprints before a development sprint?

Jeff: Yes. Absolutely. That’s really the core of Lean UX is how to bring as close together dev and design into the same timeframe. That’s what we’re focusing on now.

The way that we’ve done it successfully is there’s an amount of upfront thinking, at the very least, that’s done by the product and design teams before we plan the next iteration.

There’s a little bit of heads up that says here are the things that we’re likely going to be working on in the next iteration. Let’s do at least a little bit of thinking around that. If there needs to be a little bit of illustration or visualization of that thinking, then it’s very, very lightweight.

It could be a sketch on a piece of paper, it could be a very rough wireframe. We’ve gone into iteration planning meetings where we’ve drawn on the whiteboard and said here’s how we’re thinking about solving this problem.

What that does is it engages the entire team in a low-fidelity way of articulating how they think the problem should be solved. Because it’s a sketch or it’s a whiteboard drawing it’s erasable. People can write over it. You can redraw it. You can redo it. That encourages that collaborative problem solving.

What happens at the end of that iteration planning when you’ve got everybody kind of tearing up wireframes or looking at sketches together is that everyone, when they leave that iteration planning meeting they understand what we’re building, why we’re building it, and what direction we’re heading in.

There’s an amount of shared understanding that you’ve built during that process that allows developers to then go and build that perhaps infrastructure layer so that you can continue to refine the design as a designer.

The other thing that’s critical as you plan your iterations in Agile is to have the UX person heavily involved in the prioritization of the back log. The back log is just the list of the stories or requirements that you’re going to build in a priority order.

The user experience designer has to be involved in the prioritization of that back log because they’re the person who knows how they’re going to design out or refine the designs they currently have as the iteration moves forward.

And so a developer may say, “I need this page, this tertiary page, in the experience design first.” And the UX designer can push back and say, “Well actually I can’t give you the tertiary page until I design the secondary and the primary page. Let’s figure out a way. Maybe there’s a task that doesn’t require any UI that you can work on first while I design the primary and secondary pages and then I can get to the tertiary pages.”

It’s critical for the user experience designer to be present and active in the prioritization of every iteration in an Agile environment.

Adam: That’s great, Jeff. Thank you for giving us more of your valuable time. I appreciate it.

Jeff: My pleasure. I hope that was helpful.

Adam: It was. To our audience, thank you so much for joining it and your support of the UIE virtual seminars. Goodbye for now.

Sometimes, it’s easy to brand what we do as the “science of the obvious.” Here we are, doing all this research, and come up with something that is painfully obvious.

The latest of the obviously obvious findings we’ve come up with? That teams who don’t have a shared understanding of their design rarely succeed at producing a great product. See? It’s obvious.

Yet it surprises me that quite frequently the obvious is not what people do. Many teams that we’ve studied don’t pay attention to whether they have a shared understanding or not. They don’t create a process to ensure everyone is on the same page. Then they wonder why their results aren’t what they want.

In today’s UIEtips, I describe the two types of shared understanding we uncovered and how one of them is far more likely to end with a successful design. I’m betting this is an article that will create some interesting discussions amongst your team.

Read the article: Attaining a Collaborative Shared Understanding.

A collaborative shared understanding is a key component of successful Agile projects. Fortunately, on January 24, Anders Ramsay will be sharing his techniques for helping teams collaborate in his UIE Virtual Seminar, Designing with Agile. Bring your team and learn the best techniques.

Have you transitioned from a contractual approach to a collaborative approach to attaining shared understanding? We’d love to hear how it went (or is going). Leave us a note below.

In less than 2 weeks, we’ll launch our web site and registration for our new event – UX Immersion Conference 2012 – Mobile/Agile. This brand new three-day event goes deep to answer your questions around 2 important themes: mobile design and the agile process.

Join us in Portland, Oregon April 23-25. Immerse yourself in 2 full days of workshops from renowned UX specialists and one day of short talks full of tips, techniques, and case studies.

Want to know more? Sign up on our email list and we’ll send you the latest information as soon as it’s available! We promise not to share your address. We hate spam too.

Visualizations are an increasingly popular way designers use to convey complex, data-driven ideas. But with so much data to choose, how do you decide which story is the most appropriate one to tell? And how do you then tell it? On February 2, find out from Noah Iliinsky.

In his UIE Virtual Seminar, Telling the Right Story with Data Visualizations, Noah will provide demo data to teach you how to effectively conceptualize, plan, and ultimately design powerful visualizations that tell the right story. But be advised: you’ll never look at data the same way again.

You’ll learn to:

• Decide what story to tell with your abundance of data
• Choose the best data for telling that story effectively
• Select which encodings best align with the data
• Design visualizations that clearly convey meaning

If you’ve read all the blog posts and still find yourself stumped with how to design visualizations of complex data, then this seminar is right up your alley. Get a step-by-step guide to reviewing, choosing, and designing effective data visualizations.

We’re bringing back Noah Iliinsky to follow up one of the most popular UIE Virtual Seminars of 2011—Information Visualization: Letting Data Tell the Story. Register for his February seminar with the code VISUALIZATION, and we’ll send you access to his first seminar.

UX design in Agile can be a frustrating experience when teams are more focused on delivery over the quality of the experience. But the thinking underlying major Agile methods such as XP or Scrum can be applied to UX design, too. On Tuesday, January 24, Anders Ramsay is going to show you how in our first Next Step Virtual Seminar—Designing with Agile.

You’ll Learn to:

• Play the project game in a different way
• Replace passive collaboration with active collaboration
• Integrate UI design with user stories
• Make UX planning part of the project rhythm

You already know that UX decisions touch every part of a project. But integrating them with Agile to communicate, estimate, and deliver the product is critical to winning.

After this seminar, you’ll be ready to knock it out of the park.

The Next Step Series

The Next Step Series will feature Rosenfeld Media authors covering critical user experience topics just like they do in their Rosenfeld Media books. And by teaming up with UIE, you’ll experience the great format and quality production values you’ve come to expect from our 90 minute-long live seminars.

[This is part 2 of a two-part post. For this article to make sense, you probably want to read part 1. This article was originally published on JohnnyHolland.org.]

In the last installment, we talked about the distinction between Hands contractors and Brains consultants. Hands are brought in by the team as an extra resource to complete work the team already knows how to do. Brains are brought in by the team to provide expertise and insight on the best way to do something the team is struggling with.

Hands and Brains require completely different skills, have different approaches, and run into different challenges. Knowing which you want to be is important.

The Role of Hands

The UX professionals who make great Hands are passionate about producing stuff. Whether it’s a pile of wireframes or a boatload of usability test sessions, they can crank through them. More importantly, they tackle every single piece of the project joyfully and proudly.

The thing to remember is someone who signs up to be Hands typically doesn’t get to say how the project is done. The team decides that up front, often before the project is started. It’s up to the Hands to match the work exactly, making it impossible to know which elements came from the Hands and which came from other team members.

When it comes to how the work is done, creativity and previous experience aren’t playing big roles. In fact, they are frowned upon. While the team focuses on getting everything done by the end project, they don’t want to step back and take the time to rethink what they are doing.

The Hands will get management’s attention if they have tricks and techniques for speeding up production, while keeping the results indistinguishable from what’s been done so far. An experienced Hands contractor brings speed and agility, while playing the chameleon to match the work of their temporary teammates.

Bring in the Brains

This is a complete opposite to the Brains—who aren’t about production at all, but instead about strategy. The Brains, when at the top of their game, are the sheriffs, coming in to clean up the town. When a team is stuck and not making progress, and it feels like they’ve tried everything without results, they call in the Brains.

Unlike the Hands, the Brains doesn’t make a good producer. Their value is squandered if they spend the bulk of their project time churning out similar items. Of course, if the team is struggling with what to produce and how, the Brains can get them started, showing them the technique and coaching them through the work. But, in this scenario, the Brains quickly backs away, as soon as it’s clear the team members can produce their own results. (Some Brains will bring Hands into the project at this point, working jointly.)

Instead, the Brains’ real value is in strategic understanding of the situation. The Brains looks at the entire scope of the project, studies the goals, and assesses the team’s capabilities and flaws.

Then the Brains suggests a new plan. They get the team started on the plan. They train the team on the tricks and techniques that will get them through that plan. Then they leave town, just like the sheriff, to go off and clean up the next team’s mess.

Why The Difference Matters

Great Hands know how to produce. Great Brains know how to analyze and persuade. They are completely different sets of skills. Hands and Brains require different personalities. It’s very rare to find one person who does both.

The Brains aren’t challenged by production work. Once they’ve done one screen or conducted one test session, they’re ready to move on to something completely different. The Brains love the variety of the tasks—coming in to something new. The Brains love seeing problems and solutions nobody else seems to see. The Brains are energized when those problems are particularly gnarly and the solutions are deviously elegant.

The Hands struggle with strategy. They always feel they’re the wrong people to ask—that someone else should’ve figured this all out by now. They thrive on having a set of constraints, a schedule, and a near impossible pile of similar things to do. They love to crank through the work, seeing the Done Pile grow while watching the To Do Pile shrink. They don’t mind their work blending with the rest of the team’s—their contribution becoming invisible to anyone outside the team. They are energized by completion.

In other words, Hands thrive on walking into a project that’s well defined while the Brains thrive on walking into a project that’s poorly understood. That’s why it’s difficult to be both. It’s a very rare person who thrives on both definition and chaos. For everyone else, they need to choose one or the other.

I’ve seen managers who have tried to have one individual contributor play both the Hands and the Brains. Often this is because of resource constraints or not realizing there’s a difference. Unfortunately, this inevitably ends in disaster, because of the opposing strengths and weaknesses of Hands and Brains. Don’t fall into this trap.

What do you thrive on? What energizes you? Where do you get frustrated? Understanding this will help you figure out if you are suited for the Hands or if you ought to be the Brains.

Producing a brand new event is exciting. Lots to think about: the speakers, the topics, and the locations. Yet what immediately separates one conference from another is its name.

Back December 2011, we asked your help in naming our brand new conference. There weren’t a lot of details other than it’s a 3-day consisting of full-day workshops and one day of short talks all focusing on two separate themes – mobile design and Agile. Like all the UIE events, we’re loading this conference with field-leading, edge-defining, top-caliber speakers providing you with techniques to immediately make a difference with your designs and inspiring insights.

We certainly weren’t disappointed with the response. We received over 450 entries.

Many of the suggestions consisted of creating a new word. Mogility, MoAgile, Magile, and Magility were popular entries.

Some folks went the acronym route. Magic: The Mobile – Agile Conference, MAID: Mobile Agile Insight & Design, MAX: Mobile Agile Experience, and MoMMA:Masters of Mobile Media and Agile.

All these submissions provided ammo for another round of name brain storming in our office. These names (some submitted, some we thought of) made the final cut.

• Be Agile, Go Mobile Conference 2012
• Adaptation: The Mobile & Agile Conference
• Adapt UX: The Mobile & Agile Conference
• BAM – Best Practices for Agile and Mobile
• UIE Trends: The UX Conference for Mobile & Agile
• Scrums and Thumbs: UX Conference for Agile and Mobile
• POP UX 2012: UX in Agile and Mobile
• UX Immersion 2012: Agile and Mobile

So how do you choose the right name, one that’ll be the forefront of the event’s brand? To make our decision, we turned to the same techniques we use for prioritizing large amounts of user data.

The Process

As with any good process, we first needed to figure out how we’d know if we did a good job. We needed success criteria. So we went about identifying the qualities of a good UIE event name.

As we looked at names we sorta liked and ones we didn’t like as much, we started discussing how they were different from each other. That gave us some perspectives: we wanted the name to be remarkable, but not too cute. It needed to be easy for someone to sell to their boss, since many folks will need to ask to come.

We knew that it had to convey the theme of the conference. A name that was easy to use in promotional materials. And that it conveyed it was associated with UX. In all, we ended up with a list of 8 attributes. But it would be impossible to find a name that matched all of those. So we needed a way to figure out which attributes were most important.

(Coming up with attributes like this is the same way we figure out what makes one study participant different from another, when we’re creating personas. We make playing cards for each participant, pull out two cards, and ask “What’s different between them?” and “What’s the same?”)

We used another technique from our client work: we gave each attribute a weight. Every person on the team assigned a number from 1 to 5, where 5 is a must-have quality and 1 is a nice-to-have.

To come up with a group consensus, we used a two-step voting process. First, everyone gives a number. Then we discussed any differences. (Why did Brian give that one a 2? Why did I give the same thing a 4?) Finally, everyone voted again (because the discussion changes people’s minds) and we chose the mode average. (Some people use median average, but that creates crazy precision that I don’t think is necessary.)

We then put our final cut of names through the criteria to see how they scored. Three names all scored pretty high. Our next step was to see how a designer would use the name in the logo. After seeing some initial sketches, it became clear what to name this new conference.

And the name is…

Are you ready? Here it is: UX Immersion 2012 Conference—Mobile/Agile.

It fit all our top criteria and we liked how we can easily shorten it to UX Immersion. (In the office we’ve already shortened it to IMUX or if you want to be Yoda like – UXIM.)

The web site will be up soon. In the meantime, if you want to get updates about the conference, sign up on our email list.

The Winners of the Contest

No one submitted this name directly, however four people submitted names that started with UX. No entries had immersion in the name. Since we can only have one winner, we decided to do a drawing among submissions from these 4 individuals. Congratulations to Gary Anderson. The other three people will receive runner-up prizes of the newly released UI16 OnDemand.

Finally, as promised, we drew three email addresses at random for the virtual seminar give away: Carol Roberts, Marci Kenneda, Chris Eklud.

Thanks to everyone who participated. Be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest updates on the UX Immersion 2012 Conference—Mobile/Agile.

Opinion wars kill design projects. An opinion war happens when two or more people hold strongly held opinions that are in opposition of each other.

Opinion wars can get messy. They can stop a team in its tracks. And the worst thing about them is they can’t be won. There is never a winner in an opinion war.

The problem with opinion wars is their foundation. Let’s say you and I are in an opinion war. You strongly think that we should do some thing and I strongly think that thing absolutely the wrong thing to do.

For you to swing me over to agreeing with you that we should do that thing, you’d need to sway my opinion. And, if I’m going to convince you it’s wrong, I’ll need to sway yours.

However, swaying opinions is practically impossible. I’d like to think I’m a smart dude and my opinion is not just some random, unconsidered thought. Instead, I’ve based my opinion on my life’s experiences, which you haven’t had. Similarly, you’re a smart dude or dudette and your opinion is based on your life’s experiences, which I haven’t had.

To sway my opinion, you’d have to convince me to put aside everything my life’s experiences are telling me about this situation and take, completely on faith, your opinions. These are based on your life’s experiences, which I didn’t have. That’s really, really hard for me to do. It’s hard for anyone to do.

Opinion wars can’t be won. The only way to move past them is to subvert them.

Using Data to Subvert Opinion Wars

One way to subvert an opinion war is with data. In a design process, the data usually comes from user research.

If I believe there a right way to design something and your experience tells you that would be a sucky design, we have an opinion war. However, if we can get a prototype of that design in front of users, we’ll get real data to make the decision. We’ll no longer be working off our own opinions and experiences.

In almost every case where I’ve seen an opinion war, data about the users has completely dissipated it. Quite frequently, the data proves that neither side was completely right and that there was a completely different way to think about the problem.

All Hail The Arbitrator

Another approach to solving opinion wars is to appoint an final arbitrator. This person is chartered by the team to make decisions and every decision they make is final, no matter what others think about it.

We use this at UIE a lot. Each project has an owner. The owner makes all the final decisions for their project.

Often the project owner isn’t senior in the organization. In fact, they can be the person with the least seniority. They are not expected to ask permission. However, when they aren’t sure, they should ask advice.

Often the advice is conflicting and, occasionally, it’s strongly held. It’s this arbitrator’s responsibility to listen to all the advice and give it serious consideration. More importantly, it’s their responsibility to make the decision.

We’ve established a culture that says it’s the right thing to do make a decision, even if that decision turns out not to go the way people wanted. Even if that decision turns out, in the long run, to have not been the best approach. This is because a decision that moves us forward is better than getting stalled.

Opinion wars can kill a great project. Care needs to be taken to ensure they don’t get in the way.

[ Transcript Available ]

The Agile development process is often accused of being too focused on delivery over the user experience. But that’s not to say that Agile is the bane of UX. Anders Ramsay believes it’s important to distinguish between Agile methods and Agile values. Many, such as fast prototyping and shared understanding are also valuable in the user experience world.

In general, the difference is a fundamental one. Agile development is very solution-focused and user experience practitioners are more interested in the problem. But it’s the commonality that is important and the realization that they are out to accomplish the same thing. Weaving UX into an Agile process and emphasizing the shared values leads to greater collaboration. Ultimately the goal is to arrive at better designs and better products, faster.

Of course, this isn’t an easy adjustment to make. Coming out of the heavy document and detailed wireframe world, Anders says that it’s more a matter of recognizing what aspects of the documents are waste and are things you could easily just have a conversation about. He admits that it can be a shocking transition to make:

“…this is people who have ridden a horse and buggy their entire life, and now I’m going to put you in a car. That’s just not going to happen overnight. It’s a new way of getting from point A to point B.”

In this podcast, Anders and Jared Spool discuss designing with Agile. Anders will also be sharing more of his insights in the first of our virtual seminar Next Step Series in collaboration with Rosenfeld Media. Don’t miss Designing with Agile on Tuesday, January 24.

As always we love to hear your thoughts. Share them with us in our comments section.

Recorded: January, 2012
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Full Transcript.

Jared Spool: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the SpoolCast. I am very happy and excited today, because I have a chance to talk with Anders Ramsay, who is delivering a virtual seminar, in conjunction with Rosenfeld Media. We’re doing a bunch of what we call the Next Step Series, and he’s doing our first one. It’s called “Designing with Agile: Fast, Effective UX Methods that Work.” And that’ll be on January 24th. You probably don’t know this, but Anders is also working on a book for Rosenfeld Media, called “Designing with Agile: Lean User Experience for Successful Products.”

Anders joins me from New York, I believe, yes?

Anders Ramsay: Yep, I’m in New York.

Jared: Excellent. Anders, how are you doing?

Anders: Good, good. How are you?

Jared: I’m doing very, very well. So, I’ve got some questions about your work with Agile. You’ve been in the business for quite a long time, right?

Anders: At least 15 years. I built my first commercial website in ’96.

Jared: OK, yeah, so just after the web had started to really take off. So, given that you’ve been around, Agile hasn’t been around, at least the values were all written up in about 2001, if I remember correctly.

Anders: Yes.

Jared: And so, when did you start working in Agile?

Anders: Well, I think I was practicing techniques probably already as early as 2004, 2005, but I wouldn’t have called them Agile because I hadn’t really become familiar with Agile at that time, and so I would say more explicitly adopting Agile methods more closer to 2008 or 2009, and since then having, obviously, been practicing that. But that’s one of the interesting things is that it’s a way of working that it’s not necessarily tied to that you have to follow, for example, these very explicit values. That’s one of the important things to understand about Agile, I think.

Jared: Yeah. I mean, what’s interesting about Agile is that there are all sorts of different layers to it. It feels to me sort of like an onion, in that you’re always seeming to peel things back, and at the core of it are these Agile values that really, I think, speak a lot to what people are trying to do and why this really is something more than just a fad or just a re-branding of something we already were doing.

Anders: Yeah. So what’s interesting and maybe confusing for people who aren’t aware of the history is that even though the “Agile Manifesto” you know, was formulated in 2001, that was something that was many, many years in the making. And it’s really sort of turned upside-down, because the methodologies that people are familiar with, they actually existed before that term “Agile” was coined. And, in turn, those methods originated from what was generally referred to as lightweight software-development methods.

So I see myself as being more of an adoptee of these earlier, original elements that became the basis for Agile. And Agile is more just like a brand, a term. It’s something that we can all refer to. We can just talk about Agile. We’re referring to this kind of way of thinking about design in general and software specifically.

Jared: Right, right. So what would you consider to be the project that would be the, accomplishment, you know, the UX/Agile accomplishment that you’d be most proud of?

Anders: There are probably several, but one that certainly comes to mind is a project I worked on, I guess a couple years ago, in which we had done a lot of maybe what we might think of as more traditional UI design work for this project. And it was a very complex enterprise project, very domain-specific. And there was really sort of a morality struggle in the project, in which the product owner and the team in general felt that, one, they felt overwhelmed by the user interface. Also, despite all our efforts to present these various wire-frames and other more traditional UX documents, they were just very concerned about, “How are we going to be able to get all these various features? I don’t really understand it. It’s not making sense to me.”

There was really a struggle, low morale with the team. And at that point, we were finally able to bring on software developers, front-end developers, onto the team, which we had been wanting to do all along, and so be able to shift then to more of an Agile approach, in which there was an intensive back-and-forth between myself and the developers, so that rather than, for example, me having a meeting with users and then coming back with some wire-frames and trying to communicate the design concepts and get their approval on that, we instead would incorporate a construction of the actual tool.

And so, what that resulted in was that we took this one concept that effectively involved the system sort of responding to the various window sizes of the tool. And this was a really critical part for these particular users because some of them needed to work on small screens, some of them needed to work on large screens. And we were able to have them actually interact with this feature. And suddenly all this hand-wringing that they had been experiencing about, “Oh, all this complexity! I don’t understand it. I don’t get it,” suddenly just melted away, and they just kind of grokked it, to use a nerdy term. It just made sense.

That was a truly powerful example of the idea of cross-functional pairing. So we’re taking pair programming and adopting or adapting that to, or extending it to, include UX. In some ways, unofficially at least, it saved the project. The morale just was boosted, and suddenly people really believed in the product and believed that this was going to be a success.

Jared: Say a little more about this pairing-up thing. How does that work in a UX frame? Because I understand how it works in programming, right? Basically, you have two programmers sitting next to each other, and they’re actually coding together, and having the two brains sort of focused on the same activity, they spot errors and defects and they come up with ideas faster. Right? That’s the idea behind it when it’s programming, but what is it when you’re talking about it from a UX perspective?

Anders: So the difference there is that we’re doing the same thing but we’re doing it across disciplines. So, in this particular case, the way that it worked is we would both start at a white board and white-board a little bit together. And then the critical part there was that the developer was very actively engaged, and he would say, “OK, I feel now that we can add more value and evolve the design more effectively by moving to starting to build.” That was a critical part.

So we made a critical shift there, when we moved to the white board and moved from sketching to sitting next to and sitting in front of the computer. And then he would start doing some construction, and then I would just kind of continue to sketch, sitting next to him, because he may need a little time to build up certain pieces, but have some quick questions, like, “Did you mean this? Did you mean that?”

And so, the debugging that’s happening there is not so much in terms of code quality but in terms of experience quality. And one of the reasons that this works, this particular instantiation of cross-functional pairing that we were doing is something called “designing in the browser,” if people want to Google that. The reason that you can do it is because, in a modern kind of software front-end development world, where we have so many patterns and things like jQuery, a lot of highly abstracted tools–jQuery, obviously Python, Ruby and so forth, and Rails–they’re able to work at a very high speed. So we’re able to actually sit next to each other and actually build, almost like building blocks.

So it’s very powerful. And it certainly does not replace pair programming; pair programming has its own place. But it’s something that is great to do for highly detailed design work, particularly when the team already has established somewhat of an interface language, so that I, for example, can say, “Yeah, let’s use that list table, and let’s use that compact dashboard and so forth.” And you’re able to work very intensively back-and-forth and really do atomic-level design work, right directly in the browser, or in your mobile device, as the case may be.

Jared: So you’re taking advantage, if I’m understanding right. You’re taking advantage of the code components that already exist and the elements that are already there. Plus you’re using these languages, like jQuery and, potentially, Ruby or things like that, that let you get things done very fast. And as a result, that means that, sitting next to the developer, you can see the interactions and those little, subtle nuances that can’t easily be explained, like, “No, wait. When you click on that, it has to fade in a little slower. Otherwise someone may miss that it’s appeared.” Right? That type of thing. You’re able to sort of work through that and say, “No, that’s too fast,” “No, that’s too slow,” “OK, that’s just right.”

You can have that conversation. And because you’re having it with the developer at that moment, it sounds to me like that gives it an advantage. Tell me if I’m wrong here, but that gives an advantage. Later on, when you’re not sitting next to the developer, that developer understands your intent and can make decisions, saying, “Oh, I bet you what Anders was talking about was this,” and can make a decision, is more likely to make a decision that matches what your intent is when you’re apart because you had that time together.

Anders: Exactly. And so, things you want to do, then, is do what in some circles is called “pair stairs,” where you want to make sure that, as a UX designer, you kind of tour the entire team or tour all the developers and actively make sure that you are actually going to be pairing, not just with this one developer, but you want to make sure you’re pairing with everybody. What happens then, which is the same with pair programming, is you’re distributing knowledge. You get knowledge distribution across the team, and eventually I don’t even necessarily need to be as much a part of the picture. Like you said, they pick up the language on their own.

But I wanted to pick up on something else you said, which was the whole reason that we’re able to do this is because of a higher velocity, of being able to kind of build faster tools. What’s interesting is that’s really the origin of Agile in general.

One of the reasons why Agile has become so powerful is because we are able to deliver working software at a higher velocity. There was a time when you could make a case for big specifications because coding was slow, time-consuming, and expensive, and that no longer is justifiable. So it is, the whole reason we can even talk about doing two week sprints or one week sprints or hour-long sprints, if you’re doing a hackathon or something, you can be turning things around in very short cycles of time, is because developers are basically able to speak in a more succinct and eloquent way with machines, use more words that have more richer meaning. Back in the early days of the [indecipherable 11:11] , it was like you’re in third grade or first grade and you have only a few words that you know. Now, we speak this very rich language. So that has then cascaded into we’re now wanting to adopt the UX practice to that new world.

Jared: This must have been really different from the ways you were working when you were doing Agile. I mean you said you started in ’95, ’96 and you had that block of time in there where stuff wasn’t Agile. This pair programming and using these components, were those the big differences or were there other big differences that sort of stand out in your mind?

Anders: The fundamental difference is really just looking at and thinking about what is valuable and effective. So in those days, to me, well let’s be clear. In the very early days, everything was just chaos and ad hoc. There was no process. So, around ’98, ’99, we started to develop and formalize specification documents and so forth. At that point, the holy grail of UX design or information architecture or whatever term was used at that time was the perfect specification document, the perfect wireframe, the document that would just absolutely crisply communicate what needed to be built, and then you know, you could hand it to somebody and they would build it.

The problem was always with the document and if it wasn’t working, then we need to make the document better, and they need to be clearer and need to add more detail and so forth. So there’s been a fundamental shift there where, rather than a document-centered model, now it’s a conversation- and human-centered model. It’s a fundamental paradigm shift.

Jared: And so by having this human-centered model that you’re focusing on, I mean this is where a lot of folks get freaked out, right? If we don’t document the overall design, how will we make sure that it all fits together?

Anders: Right. Yeah, this gets to the core of what somebody who’s coming from a very document-centered world – somebody who’s really been indoctrinated into the design document as the culmination of one’s work, of one’s practice – it can be scary to think of a world in which you’re really centering your communication around conversation, direct interaction. For me and as for most people who adopt this, it’s something that is gradual. It’s not as if one day you’re doing heavy, big specifications and, the next day, flip the switch, and now we’re just going to talk and use barely sufficient artifacts. It’s something that is progressive.

So, early on, somebody who’s adopting an Agile approach, they’re probably going to continue to create fairly detailed wireframes. Over time, they’ll discover, they’ll think of it more and more as waste. They’ll think of it as, “Why am I adding all this detail? Because we could just have this conversation.” So it’s more that you have an increasing understanding of what elements in the documents that you create are waste. That is something that is, as your practice matures, your ability to perceive what is waste in the documents or whatever artifacts you’re producing increases. It becomes more acute.

Additionally, it’s not the simplest thing. It’s not a cut and dry thing as far as either it’s waste or it’s not waste. It’s highly contextual. It’s specific to each team, each project, and who you’re working with. So, for one project, it may make sense for me to maybe crank out a very detailed wireframe which has all kinds of annotations or whatever in a certain point for a certain project. Then, on the next project, it doesn’t make any sense at all. There’s much more value in me just scribbling a few lines on a whiteboard and then talking to those scribbles with a developer. It’s highly contextual. But it’s also certainly not something that happens overnight. We’re talking about basically this is people who have ridden a horse and buggy their entire life, and now I’m going to put you in a car. That’s just not going to happen overnight. It’s a new way of getting from point A to point B.

Jared: I think that a lot of people feel, though, they’re sort of thrust into this world where they have to not only go from the horse and buggy into the car, but they go from the horse and buggy to driving in NASCAR. [laughs] That that’s what’s expected of them. That’s a hard transition I would think.

Anders: It is. So part of what I’m trying to achieve with the webinar, with the book, and all the workshops and everything is to provide UX designers with a combination of thinking tools, basically a mental model to understand Agile, how to think of it, to see it, to give them a clear mental model of it. Then, a readymade set of tools that they can use as a starting point to be able to function in this very different world. Then hopefully as they understand Agile thinking under Agile values, they can customize and create their own tools and shape them to their particular situation. Certainly it is challenging, but that’s one of the reasons why I feel it’s important to be doing what I’m doing.

Jared: It seems to me that getting your head around those Agile values really helps a lot, because when I first saw them, I looked at them and I said, “You know, that’s sort of what we were doing all along.” This idea of individuals and interactions over processes and tools. That to me feels like focusing on the users, focusing on the way that we talk about our users, everything from having good personas so that we can talk about users and what they do in a realistic format to working along with the developers directly and having them see usability tests, all that stuff. That’s one of the core values is this individuals and interactions over processes and tools, right?

Anders: Yes. So one of the things there that’s important to understand is that those values are the equivalent of you reading a description of Rome in a guidebook versus going to Rome. [laughs] So it is an attempt to convey the most key attributes but, at the end of the day, it’s just something you have to do it to really understand it. Once you’ve done it, suddenly these statements take on a whole new meaning.

At the same time, I feel as if they are very, very high-level and it’s almost an understatement to call them the tip of the iceberg. I mean it’s just the very, very ultra-distilled representation of what we mean by Agile and there is such a universe of this entire culture, you know? So here I go, I read this one paragraph blurb about Italy and visiting Rome and Italian culture. And what have I understood if I’ve never been to Italy? Well, not a whole lot. But if I go Italy and I spend time there and then I come back and I reread that same blurb, it’s going to have a whole other much richer meaning, as with anything else. This isn’t anything particular to Agile. With anything else, it’s helpful but you have to do it.

That is why I try to take a very active, kind of workshop-oriented approach when I can when I talk about this stuff, to actually get people engaged and in some fashion experience what Agile means, or provide instructions, to say, “Now that we did this, here, go out and try and do this activity, activity X, activity Y.” So it is in some ways its own culture, its own set of values and norms, and that has both a good side and a bad side. There’s a dogma that is called a sort of negative side of Agile. It’s a curiosity in my opinion because the idea of dogma in itself is antithetical to Agile values, but it’s there. You have to just be accepting of that reality and then work through it.

Jared: I was talking to somebody just yesterday about that dogma. What occurred to us was that it seems that when you’re new to something… Of course, a lot of UX people who are new to Agile are actually working with entire teams that are new to Agile, so everybody is new. When you’re new to something, you almost require that dogma to be there in order to be successful because you’re sort of taking it on faith that the way you’ve been doing things needs improvement. That dogma is really important to having that faith-based approach to things until you’ve had enough time to know that you can break the rules and which rules are really effective and which ones aren’t. You need to have solid rules and be really dogmatic about those rules in that period. That’s sort of getting used to something.

Anders: So one of the problems is that the rules that have been devised by methods such as Scrum and XP are intended to achieve a different set of goals and a different set of objectives in contrast to what a UX designer does. A case in point is a user story is one that is solution-focused. Basically, it’s one where it’s been designed to find the most effective route to get the customer or the client or whoever it is to tell the developer what to build. Tell me what to build.

Jared: You know, as a doctor, I need to find my patient’s X-ray.

Anders: Yeah, so that’s design. You’re asking them to do the design. Now in UX, a core aspect of UX is that, in many cases, what we do as UX designers is we effectively give the customer what they do not know how to ask for, right? So in that regard, what we want to understand is not what the solution is. We want to understand what the problem is. The developers are not really interested in that. Just tell them what to build.

Jared: The problem for that particular story might be more complicated. Like, as a doctor, I want to discover that there have been tests that just came back that I didn’t realize were ordered because they were ordered by another doctor in the ward. And therefore, I want to take that information into account when I’m doing my rounds and diagnoses.

Anders: Yep. What’s interesting is for any one problem there’s, of course, any number of possible solutions. That is where the UX expertise comes in. It’s in helping shape and determine which the best solution for the particular context is and so forth.

And that is not something that Agile methods… And I want to be really clear about distinguishing between Agile methods and Agile values. Agile methods, such as XP, extreme programming, Scrum, other methods, are focused on delivery from the perspective of a developer. I’m being very simplistic. I’m being very generalizing. But from a very generalizing, simplistic perspective, those methods are delivery-focused. This is about shipping, shipping early and often. Once it’s out the door, I’m onto my next feature. I’m building my next feature.

But, from my UX perspective, at that point, sometimes that’s where the real game begins. Now we’ve got to validate this thing. We’ve got to make sure was it really as good as we thought it was going to be and so forth. Then, of course, there is the question of what are we going to ship, what are we going to build, what is the product going to be, and that requires sometimes a much more holistic perspective than this more incremental model that many Agile methods tend to lean toward.

Again, I am generalizing in some regards, but that has been my experience, that the well-established Agile methods are focused more on being told what to build and then finding the most effective way to deliver that. That’s a very good and important thing, but it does not in itself make a whole practice.

Jared: That’s a really important fact that I think gets glossed over a lot. One of the realizations that I had very recently – I hadn’t considered this – was that a lot of the stuff that we see for Agile, the practices that have evolved, they all have a heritage that comes out of internal system development where the customer is somebody who often works down the hall and eats in the same cafeteria. So the teams when they say, “OK, we’re going to have a customer on the team,” they don’t really have a customer on the team. They have someone who is pretending to think about the needs of the customer but who may not have any more information than anyone else on the team has.

Anders: Yeah, I mean, some interesting things that may be sort of shocking to a user experience designer is actually that Agile in its original methods are actually not user-centered. They’re client-centered.

They’re all originating from an enterprise world, and they’re originating in the early enterprise universe in which it wasn’t so much about, “Oh, is that button right or does it feel right?” It’s like, “Does it work?” Allow me to click on the button and build it so that the thing that I need to get done when I click on the button happens happens, and that’s it. So that is why, in the early days of software development…and I mean early. In the day when… I guess this would be in the 90s, mid-90s, 80s. Obviously software development goes further back than that, but as far as when we were just getting into GUIs, graphical user interfaces, at that time, particularly in an enterprise context… I don’t want to talk about Apple and all these things that were happening at the same time where we were getting much more into formalizing human factors and so forth.

In the context of an enterprise, the user interface design, that was just another task that the developer would undertake. So they would select a drop-down or a radio button, whatever the case may be, and what most pragmatically and effectively would achieve the feature that the customer had asked for. And so that has then continued on within Agile methods and, in a pure XP model, the user interface is just another task that is part of delivering the story. Now, of course, there’s an awareness, obviously, with the evolution of more advanced user interfaces and so forth that that is not sufficient, but that has been part of the growing pains of Agile and part of the changes that have been necessitated by that and part of what the Agile UX movement is all about.

Because we’ve gone from a world in which, if Agile were a restaurant, it’s gone from being this institutional cafeteria where basically whatever you get is what you get to a food court where if I want to get a to-do app on my iPhone, I have at least 50, more than 50. So which one do you think people are going to pick? Well, they’re going to pick the one with the highest, best experience quality, because they all pretty much have the same features. So it’s this new world where experience quality is a fundamental factor determining success, and that was just not really part of the equation when Agile, you know, originated.

Jared: To me, it seems like UX folks who are new in this environment, they can benefit a lot by sort of understanding this history of it and being able to talk the language of Agile and say, “Look, what I want to do is exactly what you want to do. I want to get us closer to those users so that the things you’re building are the right things and really are valuable to the people who we’re trying to design for, and I want to do it as quickly as you can.” And so having techniques and methods that aren’t so documentation-focused but are really, like you said, pair programming, sitting down with people, talking about them, getting everybody on a common ground, and having tools like fast prototyping, things like that, all of that becomes really essential to making this work.

Anders: Yeah and for me, one of the core attributes of an Agile UX practice is the idea of active collaboration. So we’re replacing this intensive rapid kind of “passing game”. I like to use rugby as a mental model for an Agile approach, and we’re rapidly passing the ball back and forth between team members. We do that, for example, through various workshop-oriented activities or pairing or other types of activities. And by doing this intensive collaboration, we reduce the need for writing things down, and that’s actually a very good thing because what’s interesting is, as software development philosophy has increased, traditional documents simply are unable to cope with that type of velocity. They were not designed for that pace of change.

I mean for a while, wikis, trying to use wiki pages and so forth, and that certainly had its place, that allows for somewhat of an increased velocity of change, but even that is in some case falling to the wayside. Ultimately, one of the few communication methods that can keep up, can cope with the everyday chaos of a software project, is direct conversation and human interaction. That’s something that’s implicit in the value statement. When it says, “We value direct interaction,” it’s really saying it’s more than we value it. We must have it in order to survive and be successful. So there’s an element of urgency that is not explicit in the Agile manifesto but, for anybody who has kind of lived and breathed an Agile project, it’s there.

Jared: Cool. Well, you’re going to be talking about how to do this in our January 24th virtual seminar called “Designing with Agile”. I’m looking forward to that. That’s going to be a lot of fun.

Anders: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it as well.

Jared: And I’m also looking forward to seeing the book, “Designing with Agile: Lean User Experience for Successful Products”, which is going to come out from the wonderful publishers over at Rosenfeld Media. And so I’m sure that’s making its way through the gristmill.

Anders: Yep.

Jared: Fabulous. Well, Anders, thank you for spending time with us today.

Anders: It’s been my pleasure. It’s been great.

Jared: I want to encourage everyone who’s listening to check out the books and to join us for the virtual seminar on the 24th. You can find all that out at uie.com, and thank you very much for taking the time to listen to us today, and, as always, thank you for encouraging our behavior. We’ll see you on the SpoolCast later. Take care.

“Thinking mobile” goes beyond scaling down an existing app to fit a smaller screen or making decisions about what content to include. The ability of an app to delight its users is largely dependent on the context in which it is being used. People are using their devices seemingly everywhere to do almost everything these days. So there’s much more than just aesthetics to consider.

Back in March 2011, Josh Clark presented a virtual seminar on mobile design where he discussed the importance of designing tapworthy mobile apps. In this article, we look at two of the questions addressed in the podcast follow up: Should content on mobile website differ from their big screen counterparts, and Josh’s opinion on native web apps versus mobile web apps. The follow up podcast covered even more material so you may want to give it a listen or read the transcript.

Read the article: Mobile Design- Content and the great Web-based vs. Native Debate

Josh’s virtual seminar on Designing Tapworthy Mobile Apps (which you can view a recording of) was so well received, we asked him to do another one. This Thursday, January 12, Josh is presenting Button Are a Hack, The New Rules of Designing for Touch. Learn more about this seminar.