Just listened to an older podcast from Jared Spool from a presentation he gave in 2006 on the topic of User experience in a high speed development environment.

Note: the slides for his presentation are also available.

 

He told about the results from research that his company did among User Experience design teams which needed to support Agile development teams with implementing UX improvements. They looked at succesful teams and compared them to strugling teams.

 

The good teams all had a culture where the strive for a positive user experience was shared with all people involved. Some ways to achieve this are:

 

Develop an experience vision

Succesful teams had developed a a shared experience vision about how the ideal experience should be now and in the future to use the product. Based on knowledge about the users this vision describes the goal of the product and the principles that guide its design. An example is the about page on the Flickr website that describes how they want to enable people to share and organise their pictures in as many ways as they can.

 

Share usability observations, not recommendations

When doing usability research often usability researchers will observe people using a design and they will then create a list of recommended changes which they provide to the developers. This could solve the usability issues found at that moment but the designers and developers on the development team will not learn from it. When you share the actual observations the you empower the team to make informed descisions. The team can come up with potential improvements and can solve the usability problems. They learn to think like users and the team can apply their new insights to any new releases.

 

Celebrate lessons learned about users with the team

When you find out something surprising about how your site is used in real life by people use this to learn and grow. Don’t let it put you down. Instead celebrate with the team that you’ve learned a valuable lesson about how your users think.

 

Share insights and experience vision with all ‘design agents’.

Don’t only involve designers and developers but also copy writers and support people and any other people having a direct or indirect influence on the user experience. A good example that Jared talked about are lawyers who create legal copy. Any legal copy that the user can’t understand has a very negative influence on the user experience. 

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