stcusesig_l digest: February 06, 2008

[Carol Barnum]

What a great article, Adrian, from Tim's Musings, about how to work 
user research into an agile development process.  I learned a 
lot!  Of course, I am envious of the company commitment to making it 
work, which is critical to success.

Thanks, too, Janus, for your insightful comments on the RITE method 
and its limitations.  I agree completely, that RITE seems to work 
best for confirming the usability of the feature of the week (or 
month, or whatever the length of the sprint), but the missing piece 
is putting it all together to understand the user experience. For 
that, you need those milestones to test goals, not just tasks, that 
users can successfully perform.

Although I find usability slipping in priority in face of the 
"higher-priority" challenges of getting features developed in short 
sprints, I'm encouraged by the example from Tim's musings and a few 
other case studies I've read.

Does anyone else have success (or failure) stories to share?
Carol


>Another nice experience report
>
>   <http://timiti.blogspot.com/2008/02/user-research-as-commodity.html>
>
>which sounds moderately applicable to Janus's situation.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Adrian
>
>Subject: Re: Agile and research
>From: "Janus Rau Sorensen" <janusrau at gmail.com>
>Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 20:05:04 +0100
>Reply-To: "STC Usability SIG discussions" <stcusesig_l at lists.stc.org>
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: multipart/alternative; 
>boundary="----=_Part_6711_26155690.1202324704517"
>
>Thanks Carol - we're also working with the RITE-method developed by 
>Microsoft - the method is basically just iterative design where user 
>research is incorporated in every iteration (the way it should be 
>:).  However, I find that this method is more applicable to 
>'traditional' usability issues and not so much user 
>experience-issues (fun, challenge, fantasy etc.) that are harder to 
>quantify.  We're struggling to find/create methods that can be used 
>to evaluate these aspects early on in the process.  In regards to 
>agile, I guess this is about getting some more qualitative success 
>criteria for the user experience into the agile-planning (?).
>
>Cheers,
>
>Janus