Agile Development and Usability
- San Francisco: Tuesday, April 3
Lynn Pausic
Full-Day Training Course
Many development teams are adopting Agile and Lean methodologies, but don’t know how to effectively incorporate user-centered design and user experience (UX) best practices into the process. This tutorial provides practical insight, whether you are new to Agile or Lean methodologies, or trying to get more out of them.
Unlike other Agile courses taught from the Engineering or Development perspective, this course is taught by a leading User Experience expert to shed light on a different perspective and lessons learned.
What You’ll Learn
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
- Identify where user experience and Agile/Lean activities are most synergistic
- Design from epics, themes and similar high-level requirement data
- Keep an eye on the larger picture
- Break down and communicate designs for execution/development
- Choose the best user testing methods and appropriately pace activities against sprints
- Create user experience criteria for evaluating sprint/release quality
- Incorporate user test findings and other user experience issues into backlogs/feature lists
Course Outline
- Introduction to Agile & UX:
- Agile/Lean principles
- User-Centered Design principles
- Agile vs. Waterfall
- Roles & responsibilities in Agile
- Agile lifecycle and UX activities:
- Why UX people should LOVE Agile/Lean methods (yes, really)
- Challenges of Agile for UX
- Challenges of UX and Agile for Development
- Natural modes for UX interaction with Agile teams
- Managing sprints to your advantage
- Definition & Planning:
- UX role and pacing in Definition
- Waterfall requirements with Agile execution
- Agile requirements and Agile execution
- UX voice in Agile planning
- Design & Prototyping for Agile/Lean Execution:
- Designing from Epics and Themes – you’re kidding, right?
- How to keep an eye on the Big Picture
- Prototyping for efficiency, reuse and easy breakdown by Development
- The importance of interaction design patterns
- Buddy design
- User Testing:
- Choosing the right user testing techniques for different points in the Agile process
- Pacing user research and testing against sprints
- How to track and prioritize findings from user testing
- UX Quality
- Judging UX quality in an Agile world
- Creating effective UX quality criteria
- Ensuring UX issues are part of the quality process
- Practicing “Design QA” and incorporating it into general quality processes
- Communication
- Natural pit stops in Agile for UX communication
- “Show and Tell” Epics – previewing designs with Development
- Breaking down designs in the context of epics, user stories, etc.
- Communication obstacles with common Agile tools
- Bringing it all together – release cycle case study
- This course also includes:
- Reviews of examples suggested by participants during class
- Interactive exercises
- Q&A
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lecture, real-world examples, exercises, Q&A and discussion throughout.
Handouts
Copies of all presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This course is intended for anyone interested in incorporating user-centered practices into an Agile or Lean development process. This includes Interaction Designers, Information Architects, Usability Specialists, User Researchers, Developers, Technical Writers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Product Managers, Business Analysts, Technical Team Leads, Project Managers, Program Managers, and Executives managing these disciplines.
Instructor
Lynn Pausic is Co-Founder and Principal at Expero Inc., a consulting firm
specializing in the definition, design and usability of user experiences for complex
applications and websites. Lynn leads the User Experience Design practice at Expero. Lynn has
worked with companies of all sizes from many industries to design hundreds of successful user
experiences. Recent clients include Charles Schwab, Freescale Semiconductor, Crate & Barrel,
Intel, Monotype Imaging and Digital Globe. Previously, Lynn was the Director of
Product Management for 2Vox, an early-stage company focused on wireless security and provisioning.
Lynn has also worked as a Director of Human-Computer Interaction, a Senior Interaction Designer,
and a Consulting Manager. Lynn has spoken on various topics related to user experience and
design in many forums and professional seminars, such as Carnegie Mellon University’s
HCI Institute, Cornell University’s Media Lab and ACM’s SIG-CHI conference.
Lynn holds a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. Lynn has presented tutorials at Nielsen
Norman Group conferences since 2006.
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