Agile is from Mars, Usability is from Venus Meetup Presentation 9/2/2010
The Brisbane Agile Academy Meetup recently hosted a lively presentation by Teale Shapcott titled Agile is from Mars and Usability is from Venus. Teale shared her extensive experience of working with business and technical teams to design and embed usability into an Agile project cycle.
A great piece of advice she offered was that as a Usability person, you can work successfully with your technology teams to introduce usability into their considerations at the different stages of the concept/initiate/deliver/deploy cycles by minimising your differences and leveraging shared core values. Although an Agile development environment is all about iterations, it is possible to have a comfortable fit with usability people who mostly work with incremental processes.
Teale also provided an extensive list of useful and practical takeaways which included -
- Practice Just in Time (JIT) research with a People, Activities & Context (PAC) analysis, as this will improve planning usability activities throughout the project
- Learn about users’ motivations and goals with a needs analysis survey
- Develop personas to conceptually model interactions with scenarios, storyboards and flow diagrams
- Use low fidelity wireframes for screen designs
- Create HTML prototypes for your interface & use as a specification during development/delivery
- Use iterations and parallel track development to chunk detailed design work
- Look for patterns in user behaviour during usability testing
- Be proactive - Become an Agile Usability Tribe Leader in the social media space eg. On Twitter – a strong source of current discussions around Usability and related topics.
You can see the video of the Meetup here.
"Agile is from Mars, Usability is from Venus" 9/2/2010 Presentation by Teale Shapcott from Agile Academy on Vimeo
or view Teale’s powerpoint presentation via SlideShare.
In keeping with our open sharing of knowledge, the list of books and articles that Teale recommended throughout her talk to help people on the path to understanding Usability can also be found on the Brisbane Agile Academy Meetup Message Board; and if you are interested in learning more about Agile, our Agile Practice Help Sheets are also available for free on our website.
Why not think of becoming a member of the Brisbane Agile Academy Meetup Group so you can see and take part in our members’ ongoing Agile events and discussions? Our next Meetup is scheduled for May.