Scrum Sprint Planning Meeting Posted by admin under Scrum Basics Sprint Planning Meeting In Scrum, every iteration begins with the sprint planning meeting. At this meeting, the Product Owner and the team negotiate which stories a team will tackle that sprint. Time-boxed to four hours, this meeting is a conversation between the Product Owner and the team. That is, it’s up to the Product Owner to decide which stories are of the highest priority to the release and which will generate the highest business value, but the team has the power to push back and voice concerns or impediments. When the team agrees to tackle the work, the Product Owner adds the corresponding stories into the sprint backlog. At this point, the Product Owner is typically asked to leave while the team decomposes the sprint backlog items into tasks. Now that sprint goals are defined, the team is ready to get to work. Watch an example Sprint Planning Meeting. The Daily Standup What have I done since the last Scrum meeting (yesterday)?
4 Strategies for Working With Designers Without Killing Each Other Fourteen years ago, in my first job where my title was “Information Architect,” I clashed with a designer. We were working at a large advertising agency that was known for stunning design work. The art directors wielded a level of power at the agency that I have never seen anywhere else, and the result over the decades was a portfolio of gorgeous print and TV ads. The design-first method had worked well for this agency, winning them awards and a long roster of Fortune 500 clients, so they naturally decided to use this approach in their newly launched web department, too. Things went well for a while, until I attended a kickoff meeting for a new website project. What followed was a long, drawn-out battle for control of the site between me and the designer. Me: And when you click on this button where does it take you? 1. We don’t always have the luxury of selecting the designer who will bring our wireframes and prototypes to life, but on occasion this happens. 2. 3. 4.
Tissue Flowers A couple of months ago, Jenny - the very lovely editor of PaperCraft Inspirations - asked me to work up a feature on different ways to use tissue paper. You can see the results in the September issue (on sale right about now), and alongside ruffles, twists, layers, buttons and twirly skirts, there's a miniature version of an old tissue-paper favourite. I made these flowers for Halloween a couple of years ago, and although the large scale can look fantastic on card projects, it doesn't leave room for very much else. By scaling it down, you create a much more versatile embellishment and your tissue supplies will stretch a little further, too. This is especially useful if you're using patterned tissue (e.g. Tissue paper (plain or patterned) Scissors Ruler Pencil Thin wire (e.g. fuse or jewellery wire) Small button or circle of card PVA glue Measure and cut out two strips of tissue paper, each around 20cm long and 5-6cm wide. Repeat on the other side of the strip, to create a complete flower-head.
Is There Any Meat on This Lean UX Thing? By Jared M. Spool Originally published: Nov 30, 2011 Out of nowhere, Lean UX is now a hot topic for UX professionals, generating the complete range of responses, from complete buy-in to calling it complete bulls**t. Is there really something to this? I was very curious about all this, so I set out to learn what Lean UX was all about. My conclusion: There really is something here. Step Into the Wayback Machine, Sherman To get a solid handle on why I think Lean UX is now important, we have to go way back into the past—to the 1960s and 1970s. However, as people found new uses, the size of the software projects grew. To keep everything under control, the field of software engineering started to emerge and one of its biggest contributions at that time was a management technique known as the Software Development Life Cycle. For these initial mainframe applications, the SDLC brought a ton of order to what otherwise was a lot of chaos. Fast Forward: The Business Takes Control
Common Mistakes when Applying Scrum | How to Create Products that Customers Hate 5 Flares Filament.io 5 Flares × The following list is a tongue-in-cheek collection of common mistakes in applying Scrum. They all influence product success negatively. Combined they are a recipe for certain failure. Apply the product owner role pragmatically: Spilt the role across several people or work with a product owner committee.Shoot for the maximum marketable product – a product that pleases everyone and has a myriad of features.Have a can-do attitude, say yes to every requirement, and put it into the product backlog. To avoid the mistakes above and to learn how to create great products with Scrum, refer to my book Agile Product Management with Scrum, or book yourself on one of my product owner trainings.
User experience is strategy, not design : peterme.com User experience, when addressed appropriately, is an holistic endeavor. The emerging conversation of “cross-channel user experience” is redundant, because if you’re weren’t thinking cross-channel (and cross-platform, cross-device, etc. etc.), you were doing “user experience” wrong. As the holism of user experience becomes more broadly realized, something else becomes clear. Earlier this week, designer Jonathan Korman tweeted, in response to a conversation taking place at the Re:Design UX conference, “STILL having trouble defining the UX design profession.” I would argue that that is because there is no such thing as a UX design profession. The practice of user experience is most successful when focused on strategy, vision, and planning, not design and execution.
Why Pinterest Is So Addictive I would have written this article sooner, but I was busy on Pinterest. If you are still among the uninitiated, the social platform for collecting, sharing, and commenting on of photos of personal passions is uniquely engaging, absorbing, and addictive. The human instinct to collect things--be it baseball cards, miniature spoons, or teacups--is as old as stuff itself. But it took Pinterest to perfect this process online. So no wonder it’s having a moment: comScore found that Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, who spend an average of 98 minutes a month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. But why would Pinterest, which has been around since 2008, be attracting such swarms of devotees now? Finding Your Happy Place and Sharing Your Ideal Self Dr. It’s more than just a critical mass of users, though, that’s driving Pinterest’s growth, says Long. Perfecting the Art of Collecting The proportion of the comments is also well-designed.
How to Get the Team Behind Your Product Idea by ZURB You have an idea for an awesome product, but your team isn't bought in. You need them behind you or else your idea will die a quick death. How do you turn the tide in your favor? Over the years, we've had this very problem and learned some hard lessons from it. We learned that internal advocates, people who share your passion, can help rally the rest of the team behind your idea. To get those people, however, you have to engage them, build a relationship and show the value in your idea. Get Early Feedback, Build Momentum Soliciting feedback as early as possible gets buy-in from the team, building momentum for your ideas. Take for instance the early stages of developing Verify. Bryan, however, wasn't just soliciting the team's feedback on Verify. Build A Crude Prototype, Show Value Quickly One way to showcase value in an idea is to build a crude prototype. See no one really saw the use for the stick note. When management ran out, they asked for more. Cultivate Advocates
Scrum Effort Estimation and Story Points Posted by admin under Scrum Basics In waterfall, managers determine a team member’s workload capacity in terms of time. That is, managers estimate how long they anticipate certain tasks will take and then assign work based on that team member’s total available time. This is problematic because it does not distinguish between a story that is very hard to complete and one that is undemanding; it only considers how long the work will take. Scrum takes a considerably different approach to determining a team member’s capacity. What does the process of estimation look like? In the Sprint Planning Meeting, the team sits down to estimate its effort for the stories in the backlog. Still, even when teams possess a shared understanding of their scale, they can’t help but estimate differently. Need an example? To see how velocity is computed from story points, watch an example Sprint Review Meeting including velocity measurement. Be Sociable, Share!
T & F Online Three studies were conducted to ascertain how quickly people form an opinion about web page visual appeal. In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web homepages presented for 500 ms each. The second study replicated the first, but participants also rated each web page on seven specific design dimensions. Visual appeal was found to be closely related to most of these. Study 3 again replicated the 500 ms condition as well as adding a 50 ms condition using the same stimuli to determine whether the first impression may be interpreted as a 'mere exposure effect' (Zajonc 1980). Throughout, visual appeal ratings were highly correlated from one phase to the next as were the correlations between the 50 ms and 500 ms conditions. Related articles View all related articles
Bean: An OS X Word Processor (Build 20100115144158) Download Bean for High Sierra or Mojave Version 3.2.13 (released 3 May 2019) for macOS High Sierra (10.13) or macOS Mojave (10.14) • Not compatible with earlier macOS versions • Includes several bug fixes. Download Bean for Sierra Version 3.2.9 (released 14 November 2016) for macOS Sierra 10.12 • New in this version: even more bug fixes for Sierra • Spanish localization (Thank you, Francisco Ramón Román) Download Bean Version 3.2.5 (released 8 March 2013) OS X 10.5 to OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), Intel only Localized for: Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Slovak Changelog / News & Plans / Previous Versions Requirements / Installation Bean requires a Mac with an Intel processor, running at least OS X 10.5 Leopard or greater. To install, double-click the downloaded file Bean-Install.zip. FAQ / Troubleshooting Answers to common questions about Bean are here. Cost / License / Sourcecode / Warranty Bean is provided at no monetary cost. Bean 3.x is closed source.
Fucking Ship It Already: Limited Products vs Shitty Products In our second installment of Fucking Ship It Already, we deal with a common problem for startups: shitty products. Look, I know that building a product with one or two engineers and no money is tough. As an entrepreneur, you almost certainly have far more ideas than you have resources to create those ideas. And it doesn’t help that you have people like me screaming, “Ship it! Ship it!” before you’re really ready. Who could possibly blame you for shipping a product that is, frankly, kind of shitty? I could. Let’s take a step back and try to understand the difference between a shitty product and a limited product. One big difference is that I wholly endorse shipping a limited version of your product. A limited product is something that may not do much, but what it does, it does well. It is not half a big product. Most importantly, a limited product is just big enough and good enough that you can learn something important from it. But a limited product probably doesn’t do anything else.
How Companies Track People Without Becoming Big Brother Andre Lavoie is the CEO of ClearCompany, the first talent alignment platform that bridges the gap between talent management and business strategy by contextualizing employees’ work around a company’s vision and goals. Privacy is a huge buzzword in today’s digitally-connected world. Companies are trying to strike a balance between transparent organizational structures that encourage collaboration and innovation, and respecting the privacy and boundaries of workers. What happens is usually far from organizational transparency and closer to micromanagement. According to the book “What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do” by Laura Stack, some 75 to 80 percent of the American workforce has suffered at the hands of micromanagement. In fact, a study by Dale Carnegie showed 42 percent of the most engaged workers felt their talents were being utilized and recognized, not micromanaged. So, how do you maintain a transparent organization without becoming Big Brother? See progress without micromanaging
Interacting with Computers - Too good to be bad: Favorable product expectations boost subjective usability ratings Volume 23, Issue 4, July 2011, Pages 363–371 Cognitive Ergonomics for Situated Human-Automation Collaboration Edited By Willem-Paul Brinkman, Mark A. Neerincx and Herre van Oostendorp Abstract In an experiment conducted to study the effects of product expectations on subjective usability ratings, participants (N = 36) read a positive or a negative product review for a novel mobile device before a usability test, while the control group read nothing. Graphical abstract In an experiment studying the effects of expectations on usability ratings, participants read a positive or a negative product review or no review in the control group. Research highlights ► Users’ expectations strongly affect usability ratings. ► Positively primed users rate a product highly even when they fail in their tasks. ► The finding calls attention to usability evaluation methods. Keywords Usability testing; Product expectations; Subjective usability ratings; Usability evaluation Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V.