Lean UX, Product Stewardship, and Integrated Teams Several emergent themes in software design and development are converging into a new way of working: Entrepreneurs understand the strategic value of user experience design in the guise of Steve Blank’s customer development and Eric Ries’ lean startupManagement are entrusting designers with product management responsibilities as frustrated designers are seeking them outAgile teams are coming to recognize the contribution of UX as designers learn to function in agile environments Each of these ideas have significant impact on the way user experience designers approach their work and how businesses structure their design and development efforts. Lean UX Traditional User Experience (UX) design techniques were developed in waterfall environments. Lean UX leverages the highly fluid nature of modern lean and agile development practices. Lean UX is not interaction design shoehorned into agile frameworks. Product Stewardship Product stewardship relieves pressure on the product owner bottleneck.
Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog? Assuming you want to increase your blog traffic, there are certain mistakes you must avoid to be successful. If you commit these mistakes, your traffic will never gain momentum. Worse, it may plateau or begin to decrease. Photo courtesy of ©iStockphoto.com/VisualField How do I know? Mistake #1: You don’t post enough. There are other mistakes, too; I doubt this list is exhaustive. Question: What other traffic-killers have you witnessed as a blogger? XpVelocity extreme programming · project planning · estimation tags: Velocity is a notion from ExtremeProgramming that helps calibrate a plan, tying broad statements of effort into elapsed time. Velocity is a statement of how much stuff a team (or a person if it's personal velocity) gets done in a time period. You should usually determine velocity by measuring how much got done in past periods, following the principle of YesterdaysWeather. A typical approach is to average the velocity the past three time periods to determine velocity for future time periods. For example, a team is working in two week iterations and estimates effort for stories using StoryPoints. Velocity is a tool for calibrating estimations for YesterdaysWeather, it is not a measure of productivity. Velocity is commonly used with fixed iterations, but you can use the same idea with Kanban based planning.
Designing better user interfaces The Roots of User-Centered Design — Beyond Wireframing: The Real-Life UX Design Process The UX Designer’s Downward Dog: Designing in a Lean Environment « Second Thoughts Posted: May 29th, 2012 | Author: Lindsay | Filed under: mobile , Projects , side project , User Interface , volunteer | No Comments » Two weeks ago, I wanted to work on a mobile design for New York Cares’ volunteers as a way to brush up on Photoshop and tinker with Marshall Bock’s iPhone 4s Template . Background: New York Cares matches approximately 53,000 volunteers every year to projects around the 5 boroughs through partner organizations. On the NYCares website, volunteers can search projects using a variety of criteria. This functionality is available through the mobile web, but is not optimized for mobile use, nor does the organization have a mobile application. Research: I created an 8 question survey to understand how other volunteers find projects (search with specific criteria versus browse), what criteria they use to select a project (type, day, borough, etc.), and the ideal project date (within a week, within a month). Check out my Pinterest boards and please do connect.
Excellent Articles on Writing Title & Description Tags | Marketi Do you wonder what the big deal is about title and description META tags? Struggle with writing them? Think you can just shove a few keywords in and be good to go? How to Control Your Listing Text in Google’s Search Results By John Metzler The listing text in Google’s search results can easily be overlooked by some webmasters in their SEO efforts. All About Title Tags By Jill Whalen Fixing just the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings. How to Create a META Description Tag – From 2004, but still amazingly relevant By Jill Whalen The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don’t affect your page’s ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns. Please share this post with your friends. 0inShare
UX and Agile: Tying the knot "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver thruppence in her shoe."—classic wedding tradition In the modern software development environment, UX and agile practitioners are becoming part of a growing culture defining the way online products and services are being delivered. The modern UX team is much more multi-disciplinary and organic than ever before, and it's no surprise that hybrid processes and methodologies are being employed to ensure better management of personnel and project deliverables. Although UX and agile both address key pitfalls that exist in traditional software development to deliver a better solution for the end-user, sometimes UX and agile approaches seem to work against each other when people focus too much on the processes and procedures. Here are some factors and advice for a happy marriage between the two. Something Old: The project management triangle Something New: The project management triangle redefined Will it Last?
Fact vs. Fiction: What Usability is Not A close friend asked me a few days ago – “You’ve covered decent ground on the science, dimensions, characteristics, design aspects, process and pervasiveness of usability considerations. How about doing a reverse bit? What usability is not about? Or the myths of usability?” In choosing to write this, I am simply reinforcing the simple concept that it is also necessary to talk about the “NOT” part in a subject as complex as usability. Usability is expensive It is known that Stanford University, Microsoft, IBM, and many others spend tons of resources (money and human) on usability research, which is quite expensive. I agree that it’s not a commodity – that there’s a price to pay. Usability is free At the opposite end of the first misconception, a large number of people believe that usability can be free. Usability is minimalism The concept of minimalism is usually a nice and welcome change in today’s noisy world. Going minimal is not alone going to get you usability. Usability is all art
Client-Centered Services By Tal Bloom Published: April 22, 2013 “Just as we ask our clients to focus on users when making design decisions for their Web site, shouldn’t we similarly focus on our clients when making service decisions for a project?” As UX professionals, we practice user-centered design—which means we stay focused on users and their needs when designing a Web site, product, or service for a client. To actually put this into practice, though, we need to convince our clients to follow our UX approach. Well, just as we ask our clients to focus on users when making design decisions for their Web site, shouldn’t we similarly focus on our clients when making service decisions for a project? Figure 1—Consider your client’s goals and user needs to create a usable design and useful content View the full-size image In this article, I’ll flesh out these ideas, but first, let’s take a look at a case study. Case Study: Cultural Roadblocks So, how did this realization affect my approach? Turn Up Your Warmth
Balanced Team Edit Central Contents Introduction: On Writing Style and Diction Tools Sponsored Links Reference Books Technical Notes Privacy Policy Contact Introduction: On Writing If you want to become a better writer, you need to do the following, in order of priority: (1) write a lot, and (2) seek ideas and inspiration, and (3) get the technical details right. This web site is mostly about the third and least important of these points. It should not be a surprise that to improve your writing you should write a lot. Inspiration does have a role to play, particularly if it can get you to write more. Lastly, there are the rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Style & Diction This is an interactive section for checking a sample of writing. The Flesch reading ease score is based on a range of 0-100, with lower values for harder text and higher values for easier text; the other scores show the approximate (US) school grade of the text. Click the "Submit" button to look for possible problems in the text. Contact
Agile Product Design, holistic product design and agile software development