The Designing the User Experience at Autodesk Digital Library collects the published articles and presentations by the individuals across our global user experience teams.
Categories
Authors
12/12/2012
Method 22 of 100: Affinity Diagramming
Download PDF
This is the 22nd in a series of 100 short articles about UX design and evaluation methods. Today, I will discuss affinity diagramming, a method for organizing qualitative data into related groups as an individual or group. This method can be used to make sense of data from lab studies, field studies, open-ended questions, brainstorming, diary studies and other methods that produce qualitative data. Affinity diagramming is often done by a group of people in a room with sticky notes, but you can also do this remotely with tools like Google® Spreadsheet, card sorting software and Microsoft® Sticky Sorter.
in Chauncey Wilson, Methods | Permalink
05/10/2012
Agile UX Method Adaptation
Download CHI 2012 Agile UX Method Adaption handouts
Skills to successfully put user-centered design into Agile projects.
Author(s): Desirée Sy and John Schrag
Published date: 5/2012
07/06/2011
Formative usability investigations for open-ended tasks
When your product is used to create things (e.g., to compose music, to paint art), how do you investigate your users’ tasks? If you are designing interfaces that can be used in unpredictable ways (e.g., interactive tools rather than screens accessed in a linear way), how do you usability test to minimize biasing your results? When users can “do anything”, what are effective, non-leading ways to limit the scope of tasks during an investigation? This presentation describes some proven tactics for conducting effective usability investigations in order to design products where either the task domain or the interface is open-ended.
Author(s): Desirée Sy
Published in: Proceedings of the Usability Professionals’ Association Conference 2006
Published date: 6/13/2006
in Agile, Desiree Sy, Human Factors, Methods | Permalink
Using Formative Usability Testing as a Fast UI Design Tool
Formative usability testing is a variation on usability testing that can be used as a fast design tool. As we practice it at our company, it features unorthodox usability testing methods, such as: changing the prototype between each test session, ignoring many details and most quantitative data, and not writing a test report. This presentation will show interaction designers how to use formative usability testing to get to optimal UI designs as quickly as possible. Attendees should be completely familiar with “standard” usability testing practices.
Author(s): John Schrag
Published in: Proceedings of the Usability Professionals’ Association Conference 2006
Published date: 6/15/2006
Interaction Designers and Agile Development: A Partnership
Agile development teams need interaction designers to make them successful (even if they don’t know it yet). Using real-world examples of effective practices, this presentation will explain how interaction designers can add value to an agile development team.
Author(s): Lynn Miller
Published in: Journal of Usability Studies
Published date: 5/1/2007
Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-Centered Design
When our company chose to adopt an Agile development process for new products, our User Experience Team took the opportunity to adjust, and consequently improve, our user-centered design (UCD) practices. Our interface design work required data from contextual investigations to guide rapid iterations of prototypes, validated by formative usability testing. This meant that we needed to find a way to conduct usability tests, interviews, and contextual inquiry—both in the lab and the field—within an Agile framework. To achieve this, we adjusted the timing and granularity of these investigations, and the way that we reported our usability findings.
This paper describes our main adaptations. We have found that the new Agile UCD methods produce better-designed products than the “waterfall” versions of the same techniques. Agile communication modes have allowed us to narrow the gap between uncovering usability issues and acting on those issues by incorporating changes into the product.
Author(s): Desirée Sy
Published in: Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 2, Issue 3, May 2007, pp. 112-132
Published date: 5/1/2007
in Agile, Desiree Sy, Methods | Permalink
Agile UX Toolkit (Slides)
As more organizations adopt agile development practices, UX practitioners want to ensure that the resulting products are still designed with users in mind. This tutorial teaches basic, proven methods to integrate user-centered design practices into agile teams.
This tutorial is for experienced UX practitioners and managers who work on agile teams, or who will be transitioning to agile. Prior experience with agile methods is unnecessary, and the course does not focus on a particular agile methodology.
The morning session teaches new skills for planning design on agile teams, and the afternoon session focuses on agile adaptations to usability testing and research methods. Research methods covered in this tutorial focus on eliciting observed user behavior (such as contextual inquiry, and formative usability testing).
GOALS FOR THE SESSION:
Participants in this tutorial will learn:
• advantages of a healthy agile UX practice over waterfall UX
• skills and attitudes to hone to do user-centred design on an agile team
• common errors when transitioning from waterfall to agile
• skill and activities that UX brings to the ‘Product Owner’ role on an agile team
• activities and best practices during Sprint Zero to increase a team’s success
• parallel-track/staggered sprint timing of agile UX activities
• how to hold a “big picture” of design without committing the agile deadly sin of Big Design Up Front
• how to break both UX work and design implementation into sprint-sized chunks
• tactics for incorporating user research into agile projects
• some suggestions for improving non-co-located agile teamwork
Author(s): Desirée Sy, John Schrag
Published in: Proceedings of the Usability Professional's Association Conference 2011
Published date: 6/21/2011
in Agile, Desiree Sy, John Schrag, Methods | Permalink
01/22/2010
Case Study of Customer Input For a Successful Product
Download PDF
Both agile development and User Centered Design stress collaboration between customers and product teams, but getting these methodologies to work well together is not easy. This paper describes one company’s efforts to merge these processes by creating interconnected parallel design and development tracks. The benefits of this approach are demonstrated by showing how, when and why customer input was
incorporated during the release of a successful software product.
Author: Lynn Miller
Published in: Proceedings of the Agile Development Conference 2005
Published date: 6/24/2005
06/19/2009
Coherent Agile UCD: Create a big picture in 2-week chunks
One of the toughest problems facing Agile UX designers is how to design solutions that consider the big picture for a product or workflow while working in consecutive 2- to 4-week sprints. Building on previous talks describing successful adaptations of formative usability testing, contextual inquiry, and iterative prototyping for Agile, this talk delves further, describing a framework for creating multi-sprint designs and getting them implemented without violating the Agile taboo against "big design."
Author(s): Desiree Sy
Published in: UPA 2009
Published date: 6/10/2009
05/24/2009
Learn as Babies Learn: A Conceptual Model of Designing Optimum Learnability
A newborn baby’s first move is to look for the nipples. This is an instinct for a baby to live, build strength and interact with the world. The interaction seems very similar to our users’ choosing a product for self-empowerment and productivity. However, most users are not babies, neither the majority of man-made products embody perfect affordances. How could user experience designers help to create an easy-to-learn product for specific user goals? This paper explores the answer via a balanced view on user-learning and machine-learning, and proposes designers’ early engagement in conceptual design together with full awareness of users’ learning constrains, so as to make users happier and thankful since initial contact with the product the designers created.P>
Author(s): Douglas Wang
Published in: HCI 2009 Proceedings
Published date: 1/24/2009
Blog