To tell a story, one of the applications I built early on, it’s not sexy but we were designing an application that would receive stuff that came into the back door of a grocery store and my response to that was “Gosh I can’t design an application that helps people receive stuff at the back of a grocery store without going there, I have to see what it looks like”. And it wasn’t just me, I had a team of developers and I said “Let’s go down to the grocery store and let’s see people receive stuff at the grocery store”. And we went back and we sat with the guy that receives carrots at the back door of the grocery store, we saw what his life was like, we snapped a few pictures we talked we watched him do his work and we came back and received stuff at the grocery store. That is talking to users and that is what interaction design is it doesn’t take going finding a specialist to do it, it takes doing it.

I guess I would say “Yes, you can find interaction designers” but I might suggest that it might be a mistake to say that this is a specialist role that we get into the team part time. This is a way we are, just like Agile is a way we are, it’s not something you pull in when you need it, I will worry about users one day a week or a week a month and rest of the time I will focus on building things.

In this interview Jeff Patton shares his ideas about UX with the Agile developers community. He also talks about how he is writing a book (together with Alistair Cockburn). Although he says he “hates the writing process” I hope he does finish it so we can get his knowledge about doing User Centered Design inside Agile projects.

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