Margareta Löfvenholm
Margareta is a senior interaction designer and usability specialist. She has 14 years of experience of creating usable and intuitive products. She runs her own firm Gaine AB which does consulting, workshops and courses in interaction design and usability. She also writes a blog www.simplyusable.se together with a friend.
Track abstract - Usability and Interaction Design - J1
Lean user experience
For many years Usability was not part of the development process but something that, in the best case, took place in a so called pre-study. That is, user experience people created tons of heavy deliverables (both documents and pixel perfect sketches) to be used during the development phase.
This documentation was very time consuming to create and when the development started it was not always helpful to use, so the intended design was not always implemented. Then came the agile movement and Scrum, where almost all kinds of usability pre-studies were totally omitted. Product managers or project managers added backlog items to be developed. The development team added a usability specialist to work together with them one sprint ahead. Neither of these approaches are any good, but now there is Lean User Experience!
Usability experts and developers work closely together in the same sprint, creating a fast mockup-prototype in just a few days, and validate it with the customer and the target group. If the prototype is not accepted, it is rethought until it fits customer and user requirements in reality. However, it is not possible to work like this unless the project has created a "big picture" of the backlog items - and how do you create a "big picture" without a pre-study?
This is a 12 minute "lightning talk"
Track abstract - Usability and Interaction Design - J1
Lean User Experience - a way forward when the project is driven by the engineers?
Usability, interaction design and graphic design are needed if you want your product to make it on the market. If you're working in the UX field you'll recognize the problem of projects that are driven by the engineers and don't make good use of their UX resources. Lean UX (user experience) is a movement trying one approach designed to solve this problem.
How does this changes our everyday work as UX-professionals? Is it good or bad? Would we be better off with an UX-driven project instead?
