Designing it up front, and throughout

I recently read a blog entry by Sara Summers, that really got me thinking. Thanks Sara!

I have been working in Agile projects for a few years now. I have come to find that part of my role as a designer, within the process, is to constantly explore and redefine exactly how to get the most out of the iterative, organic nature of the process and still make the time to get a kick-ass design in place.

my Twitter convo with Sara:

@ssummers I think most designers have a tuff time w/ many Agile principals. It is a Dev focused process after all.

@jason_goodwin Agreed. It can work if oxygen is supplied to design upfront.

I thought this was very well put, indeed. And it begs the question; How much design and how far up front?

As designers, we feel we need to have a complete view of the entire experience before the building can begin. One of the things I like the most about designing in an Agile environment is not knowing exactly what I 'should' be doing and going with the flow. The down side of this is finding the best way to inject the stuff you learn during each iteration back into the overall experience. I have some ideas about this, but that's a different show...

I am also not a fan of reading/writing huge documents. I like communicating ideas visually and Agile not only allows me to do that, it forces me to. I have found that most of the other people on the project would rather look at at picture of what it is we want to build vs. reading about it.

Something Sara takes issue with is the notion that designers should have to write code. I write tons of code, for a designer. So much that I consider myself a pretty decent UI developer. It's my feeling that if you are a designer who wants to learn some code, or wants to expand on what they know already, Agile is great for that. You get to work side-by-side with developers and QA folks and is a great way to get better, faster. On the flip side, if you don't want to write code, you get to teach some developers a thing or two about design (I have yet to work with one who didn't want to learn). I see it as a win-win.

Please look at Sara's site http://www.uxarray.com it's quite good.

Coming Clean

I think, perhaps, maybe...

The reason I don't blog here more, is because I seem to have bad luck with the Agile projects I have been assigned to. There always seems to be some reason that someone, or group, just doesn't want to play along. It's as if they don't understand that by not getting involved, they doom the project in some way. It's kinda sad, really. And it seems to come down to, "not having enough time" or "there's someone else who should be doing this". LAME...

In economic time like these, shouldn't one of the goals be efficiency? Use what you have and get the most you can from it? C'mon people, get with the program... enough half-stepping...

grrr... rant...

an agile job hunter

I was recently laid off my gig. I knew it was coming so I tried to prepare myself as best I could. I spent loads of time on Monster tweaking my profile and resume. Brought my LinkedIn profile up to date. Asked all my friends and colleagues to recommend me.

The flood of calls from recruiters gave me a false sense of hope. I was getting calls, but no interviews. One little thing I did learn was; if you treat every conversation with a recruiter as an interview, you will be much better off when (if) they get in front of an actual potential employer. Think of it as a dry run.

It can be tough selling yourself. Having the confidence to say that you are great at what you do, and deserve to paid for it, can be a hard hill to climb. But climb one must. Here's a short list of things to keep in mind:

- Don't be afraid to talk about money. Your rate should roll of your tongue, no hesitation. If you get the sense it's too high (and of course it always is) the word 'negotiable' can go a long way. But stick to your guns.

- Know what you want from a job. Is it a good company? Do they deserve you? Wiil they let do what you want, what you think is important? It's a two way street.

- If you are dealing with recruiters, don't be afraid to hound them. They make money by finding you a gig. Make them do their jobs. It shows you care.

- Most important one: Call people you have worked with in past first. Use your network, no matter how small. When someone you respect and respects you recommends you for a gig, it holds a lot more weight.

I was able to turn my personal network into paying contracts. While I wait to hear back from the recruiters.

Lazy

I am so lazy. I don't write here much. I am going to try to be better...

Skip Navigation - I think we have that backwards

I was recently listening to a blind person explain how he goes about reading a news article online. He said that he looks for a link to print the article so his screen reader won't have to deal with navigation, sub-navigation, ads and other things that get in the way of getting to the desired content - the news story.

This got me to thinking about the general approach to Skip Navigation. The one I am most familiar with is, basically, to add functionality to the top of the page, or any navigation that resides in the page, to skip over it and into the main content. Now, let's say we have a big site. It has a top level navigation and sub-navigation based on what section you are in. Would I skip from the main navigation to the sub-navigation, then skip to the content? For the disabled user this sounds like a lot of work and can be potentially confusing.

So, I started to think about this in terms of what is the real desired outcome of skipping navigation. When I click on a link, I'm want to read the content that is behind that link. I don't want to read the navigation again, or read the next level of navigation, or the ads on the page. I use secondary navigation as a next step, or last resort, if I didn't find what I was looking for.

So, what if, instead of building pages that have lots of skip navigation code, we build pages that automatically put cursor focus on the content, and there's a way to 'skip' to the navigation? Like the finding a stripped down version of the content, the print version for instance, this method just puts out a simple rule: Drop the cursor where the content starts. The user doesn't even have to know about the extra stuff on the page, until they go looking for it. Now they don't have to spend time skipping over stuff, and not knowing where they might land.

Passion – The Good and Evil

In many of my of the jobs I have had, there would eventually come 'review time'. I was often criticized as being "…too out spoken… unapproachable… pissy… mouthy… boat-rocker… pot-stirrer", while, at the same time, being praised for "team work… innovation… stick-to-itiveness… and lots of hard work" but above all passion.

Passion is a funny thing. We love it when things are going good. As soon as things turn bad, passion is mistaken for aggressive or overly negative. I have had to defend my self many times on this point. Critical != Negative. In fact, outspoken people can be the ones who care the most. Never discount a bigmouth just because they are willing to voice the unpopular opinion. Besides, I like to believe people can see right through being negative just for negative’s sake.

A friend I was working with recently told me our Project Manager remarked to him, about me, "Man, that guy bitches a lot." And I do, when I see things aren't going as well they could be. I am also the first person to pat a team mate on the back and say, "job well done."

I spend more time at my job than I do with my kids. I need to care. That's when I know it's time to go, when I stop caring. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction you get from giving a crap about the work you do. I think that's a big part of being a professional designer, you can't phone it in. Designers get frustrated and mad and defensive because they are in a place where subjective opinion runs amuck. We have to stand up for the decisions we make and defend them against second-guessers on a pretty constant basis. I don't think that happens without passion.

Adding accessibility to an application or web site shouldn't be like putting toothpaste back in the tube.

Good experiences don't just happen; they are planned for and executed on. Why is the accessible experience any different? An afterthought? An additional margin/metric/number that pads project time and cost?

When deciding on a target audience for any web site or application, there's always that under lap and over lap of users. "We want to target Intermediate-Advanced users, but there will be some Intermediate users and some Expert users and we want everybody to get exactly what they want…" Those fringe use cases can drastically change the experience for that those target users and everybody's OK with it. I'm OK with it. Yet, when accessibility comes up, it’s somehow more than fringe. It' like long-tail or outer limits.

The exercise of creating an accessible experience forces us to break down the message into very simple terms and figure out how to deliver those terms in a new way. If we take this into consideration early in the design process does it not enhance the visual design?