Agile Methods and User-Centered Design

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Agile Methods and User-Centered Design Recent
Work
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Overview (In Case I Get Lost)

• Intro to agile
• Problems
• Intro to User Centered Design
• Where is it?
• A question of design
• Can they be combined?
• Various attempts
• Summary

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What is Agile

• 4 values 12 principles
• Existing types, and custom builds
• Incremental development, iterations, flexibility
• Communication
• Emerging development (YAGNI), no (BDUF) or
  framework development
• Emphasis on testing
• Generalists
• Project vision???
• About code and development (inward focus)
• Tacit knowledge sharing

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Misconceptions

• Agility isnt about speed
• Less of a process and more of a set of heuristics

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Problems

• Agile might not scale
• Inward focused (Code Centric)
• Separating design from engineering
• The customer is the expert
• User stories written by customers, not users

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Thinking Like an Engineer

• Draw a table named person. The table should have
  4 columns named
• NAME
• AGE
• HEIGHT
• WEIGHT

Answer
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UCD from IBMhttp//www-306.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_e
xt.nsf/publish/2

• Norman and Draper 1986
• User-Centered Design is a method for designing
  ease of use into the total user experience with
  products. It enables organizations to
  consistently develop engaging products that are
  easy to buy, easy to set up, easy to learn, easy
  to use, and easy to upgrade. It calls for a
  multidisciplinary team to design everything the
  user sees and touches and to gather user input
  and feedback during each stage of the development
  process.

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IBM Messages for Promoting UCD

• Is your technology showing?
• Nobody buys ease of use, but nobody buys products
  without it either
• Ease of use may be invisible, but its absence
  sure isnt
• Want to make the most of the e-business
  opportunity?
• Do you know who your users are?
• Engineering the killer app isnt exactly childs
  play. But using it better be (difficult to use
  systems fail)

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Others?

• GUIDE
• BRIDGE
• OVID

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Where is it ?
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Design for Developers

• Consistent interface
• Clear vision for product
• Reasonable expectations of technology
• Others?

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Design for Users

• Gulfs of understanding
• Consistency
• Simplicity
• Memory issues
• Status indicators
• HCI and design

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You dont need to understand how this works to
tell the time.
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http//pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/tamj/481/
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Can we Combine Them?

• User input early in the process (human-centric)
• Prototyping
• Evolutionary design
• Iterations
• Light documentation
• Rates of change

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Can we Combine Them?Boem and Turner

• 6 Observations
• Neither agile nor plan-driven methods provide a
  silver bullet
• Agile and plan driven have a home ground
• Future trends are toward hybrids
• Balanced methods emerging
• Better to build up than to tailor down.
• Methods are important, but silver bullets are
  more likely to be found dealing with people,
  values, communications and expectations
  management

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User Centered Design (Light)?

• Usage Centered Design http//www.foruse.com/
  Constantine and Lockwood
• Discount Usability Engineering, Jakob Nielson,
  www.useit.com
• Alan Coopers Interaction Design ???
• Rapid Contextual Design http//www.incent.com/cd/c
  dhow.html
• Code Science http//www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk
  /2002/10/manzo.html
• Jeff Patton incorporating Usage Centered Design
  into an agile software development environment.

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Usage Centered Design

• Model driven approach
• Role model
• Task model
• Content model
• Essential model

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UCD Model Driven Approach
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Use Case VS Task Case
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Key Differences Between UCD and UCD
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Discount Usability Engineering

• Method for evaluation interfaces
• Scenarios
• Simplified thinking aloud
• Heuristic evaluation
• Validating discount usability engineering

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Scenarios

• Horizontal prototype
• Vertical prototype
• Paper mockups

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Simplified Thinking Aloud
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Heuristic Evaluationhttp//www.useit.com/papers/h
euristic/heuristic_list.html

• Visibility of system status
• The system should always keep users informed
  about what is going on, through appropriate
  feedback within reasonable time.
• Match between system and the real world
• The system should speak the users' language, with
  words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user,
  rather than system-oriented terms. Follow
  real-world conventions, making information appear
  in a natural and logical order.
• User control and freedom
• Users often choose system functions by mistake
  and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit"
  to leave the unwanted state without having to go
  through an extended dialogue. Support undo and
  redo.
• Consistency and standards
• Users should not have to wonder whether different
  words, situations, or actions mean the same
  thing. Follow platform conventions.
• Error prevention
• Even better than good error messages is a careful
  design which prevents a problem from occurring in
  the first place.
• Recognition rather than recall
• Make objects, actions, and options visible. The
  user should not have to remember information from
  one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions
  for use of the system should be visible or easily
  retrievable whenever appropriate.
• Flexibility and efficiency of use
• Accelerators -- unseen by the novice user -- may
  often speed up the interaction for the expert
  user such that the system can cater to both
  inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users
  to tailor frequent actions.
• Aesthetic and minimalist design
• Dialogues should not contain information which is
  irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of
  information in a dialogue competes with the
  relevant units of information and diminishes
  their relative visibility.
• Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from
  errors
• Error messages should be expressed in plain
  language (no codes), precisely indicate the
  problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
• Help and documentation

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Contextual Design
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Rapid Contextual Design (Defining the New
Process)

1. Set focus
2. Do contextual inquiries
3. Build an affinity
4. Introduce the larger team to customer roles and
   data
5. The full team
6. Build user stories
7. Run a release planning process
8. Prioritize and eliminate
9. Design detailed user interfaces
10. Test UIs
11. Provide the user stories to development
12. During iteration 1, UI team works on iteration 2
13. Iterate as with agile methods, keeping the UI
    team 1 iteration ahead of development.

Beyer, Holtzblatt (8)
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Code Science

• Based on XP
• Business process analysis
• Componentized architecture
• Automated contract and regression testing
• Story actors
• Wall Gantts
• Automatic document generation
• - 40 hour work week
• - Metaphor
• Code Science is registered in the U.S. Patent and
  Trademark Office.

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Adding UCD to Agile (Patton)
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UCD Techniques Are Threaded Into An Agile
Development Cycle
Role-centric acceptance testing
Feature List
Role and Task information determine bug
criticality
Role Information Informs Priority
Role and Task information indicate scope cutting
opportunities
Reconcile Roles Goals With Tasks Features
Feature List
Context Modeling
Feature List

• Collaborative Requirements Worksession
• Role modeling, task modeling, context modeling,
  span planning

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Customer Centered Response

• UCD big design up front
• Agile Let the design grow organically over
  the course of the project
• Can they co-exist?
• Living artifacts?
• Compromise between the two methods
• Picture of the overlap between the two circles

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Summary

• Integrating User-Centered Design into agile
  methods attempts to solve the perceived problem
  that current agile methodologies are not
  adequately addressing user interface design
  issues.

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References

• Agile Alliance, (2001) The Agile Manifesto,
  http//www.agilemanifesto.org/
• Cooper, Alan. The inmates are running the Asylum,
  SAMS, 1999
• Garrett, Jesse James. The elements of User
  Experience, New York New Riders, 2003.
• Constantine, Larry. Process Agility and Software
  Usability Toward Lightweight Usage-Centered
  Design 110 2002 http//www.foruse.com/articles/a
  giledesign.htm
• Constantine, Larry. Usage-Centered Engineering
  for Web Applications 117 2002
  http//www.foruse.com/articles/webapplications.htm
  
• Boehm, Barry and Turner, Richard. Observations on
  Balancing Discipline and Agility
  http//www.agiledevelopmentconference.com/2003/fil
  es/P4Paper.pdf.
• Brooks, Frederick. The Mythical Man-Month
  Addison Wesley Longman Inc. 1995.
• Patton, Jeff. Improving on Agility Adding
  Usage-Centered Design to a Typical Agile Software
  Development Environment http//www.abstractics.co
  m/papers/AddingU-CDToAgileDevelopment.pdf

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References Continued

• Cockburn, Alistair. Crystal Clear,
  Addison-Wesley, 2004.
• Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things,
  Doubleday/Currency, 1988.
• Manzo, John, AgileTek L.L.C. Odyssey and Other
  Code Science Success Stories, http//www.stsc.hill
  .af.mil/crosstalk/2002/10/manzo.html
• Holtzblatt, Karen / Beyer, Hugh / Baker, Lisa. An
  Agile User-Centered Method Rapid Contextual
  Design, http//www.incent.com/
• Nielsen, Jakob. Guerrilla HCI Using Discount
  Usability Engineering to Penetrate the
  Intimidation Barrier. 1994. http//www.useit.com/p
  apers/guerrilla_hci.html
• Patton, Jeff. Improving on Agility Adding
  Usage-Centered Design to a Typical Agile Software
  Development Environment. 2003. http//www.abstract
  ics.com/papers/AddingU-CDToAgileDevelopment.pdf

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New Concepts I learned

• User Experience Architecture
• User Interaction
• Affinity Clusters tasks that are likely to be
  performed by the same role.
• This is not yet finished, nor is it really part
  of the presentation.

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My PERSON Table
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