Professional Documents
Culture Documents
AGILE
INTERACTIONS
Sami Niemelä
Creative Director, Nordkapp
@samin / www.nordkapp.fi
The topic I want to talk about today is combining interaction design practice
with agile development. And especially working from the outside on a
consultants’ point of view. To coincide with this, a project we just finished
“a world record in agile” where we helped to build a online tv system for our
client SuomiTV on top of Brightcove’s technology platform.
Agile
1 : marked by ready ability to move with
quick easy grace <an agile dancer>
2 : having a quick resourceful and adaptable
character <an agile mind>
source: www.merriam-webster.com
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Here’s the original agile manifesto. As you can see, it’s all about the
constant adaptation to change. This is where I think a lot of the challenges
arise. Don’t get me wrong — agile is good for a lot of things such as quick
ROI for client - things happen visibly all the time, and the main goal is to
produce working software. As Agile is based on sprints, it's also quite good
on keeping the train moving in design as well
STRUCTURE
VS
CHANGE
Here’s a quote from a friend of mine when discussing agile & ixd on Twitter. I
think it crystallizes the issue pretty well. What we need is a controlled way of
working in sync with the developers without sacrificing the long term clarity.
DESIGN
DEVELOPMENT
TIME
One thing worth noticing as well is that large projects tend to be design-
heavy in the beginning, but once everything is defined the development
starts rolling on – and the need for design keeps getting smaller.
COMPLEXITY
TIME
On the other hand, in an agile project, complexity grows over time. the
bigger and longer the project, more moving parts to take care.
Strategy
Here’s the design process broken down into agile sprint model. The basics
are pretty simple - planning is done one sprint ahead of design is done one
spring ahead of development. All fine and dandy–
Strategy
How to do this then? One important question is ask here is are you working
on supporting an existing product or creating something new?
“SPRINT 0”
S0 S1 S2 S3 ETC
The purpose of S0 is to make sure your team has everything they need to do
their work. In terms of design, here are the things that are necessary to
make the project happen:
— Strategy — where are you intending to go to and why?
— How will your team get there? e.g. design patterns, any frameworks,
design drivers and principles.
— And of course the right people.
—WHO ARE THE
KEY PEOPLE?
As in anything, the key asset for successful project are the people involved.
—SCRUM MASTER
The design teams—Why a plural? Because in the long run, a project needs a
lot of support on implementation phase as well. And if your team has to
design the concept along with giving out support for the dev team, it gets
quite intense quite soon. And in order to deliver quality work, we need to
make the support a team on its own.
—THE PRODUCT OWNER
You most important person is the Product owner - someone who is involved
with the project 100%, and senior enough to be accountable for major
decisions. I agree with Alan Cooper on that ideally PO is a senior interaction
designer. It has to be someone who understands all sides of the project, a
generalist.
—WHAT CAN
GO WRONG?
So, like said—going agile means going systematic. There are several things
that can go wrong but are easily avoidable.
— NO STRATEGIC DIRECTION
First one is having no vision. This means decision making has no direction,
and this leads very easily to reactive, scrum-led design which doesn’t quite
work for anyone.
— LACK OF CLEAR,
SHARED VISION
Apart from existing, the strategy should also be shared and communicated
to everyone involved. The decide-as-you-go -moments will be some much
easier and consistent when everyone knows where the projects should go
to. Be visual, tell stories here.
— NO COMMON CULTURE
with no culture, your project is a mess ›More complex the project, more
systematic you need to be. Establish ways of working, build the culture for
the teams. Even down to small details like email rules. Sounds nitpicking,
but when you put strange people working together in a mid-to high stress
environment, it's the small things like these that cause friction.
— PRODUCT NOT OWNED
Like said, these are the opvious pitfalls but they are quite avoidable as well.
— Have a vision that everyone understands.
—Make friends with the developers. In the end, they are the ones
that make or break the project.
I’d like to propose an Agile Interaction Design manifesto on top of the old
one:
So, to conclude this thing. At best, working with a solid agile team is a
wonderful experience. I'd like to compare it to a swarm intelligence—
everyone acts as individuals on shared goal, DNA, and culture. It's not easy,
but it can be done. The results of a working process can be beautiful.
KIITOS
Sami Niemelä
Creative Director, Nordkapp
www.nordkapp.fi
Thank you. It was a pleasure talking to you. Please ask questions, comment
—I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.