Agile Methods vs. Interaction Design
I’m a UI guy (not that you can tell that by this website mind you) – the vast majority of my development experience has been on “the front end” and I consider myself a usability guy. Sure, I’m not classically trained, I don’t have PhD (yet) but I’m a longtime member of ACM’s SIGCHI and for a while I belonged to the UPA (which I plan on getting back into now actually.) In my experience, you can have the most technically perfect domain model connected to a finely tuned database but if you’re UI sucks, so does your product.
I also think that most software projects would be FAR more successful if they spent just a few hours watching their users do their actual jobs. Too often, I’ve been involved in projects where a manager or supervisor would tell us what their people needed to do their jobs…and I don’t need to tell you they were almost always wrong. A few days of paper prototyping with some real users is a investment that pays dividends (unless they decide to write all over your prototype with red pen but that’s a blog for another day!)
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that Agile methodologies are the best way to develop software. Inevitably, requirements change and the ability to deliver working code regularly works. Most customers aren’t able to think as abstractly as most programmers so actually seeing something real will get you much closer to meeting their needs than months of requirements gathering. Beyond the fact I think it works better, I particularly like the importance placed on people in Agile methodologies.
Of course I’ve never been in a position to truly work in an Agile way (despite the recent buzzword bonanza at my current employer) but I’ve always wondered, how does the UI fit into Agile? More to the point, what about Interaction Design? Well, I ran into this very interesting article/interview between Alan Cooper (author of one of my favorite books: The Inmates are Running the Asylum) and Kent Beck (“father” of XP and co-creator of JUnit) – quite a fun read! More often than not, they agree and I think they would make a formidable pair leading a development project but they have some significant disagreements. Anyhow, good read.
What do you think? How do you agile user interface design? Can you? Can’t we all just get along?
