frAgile
Interaction 08 saw quite a bit of debate around the role of design in an Agile development environment. Viewpoints ranged from Jeff White and Jim Unger’s process that includes developers in the brainstorming sessions, giving them shared ownership of the solution and appreciation of the designer as an expert to the near-militant stance of Alan Cooper and Bill Buxton who felt that we should be making all of the decisions about features and behaviors before a single developer begins work.
I think there is a happy medium between these extremes. In fact, I know there is, because I found it in my current company. I have a very rewarding relationship with the developers I work with. They respect and value my expertise enough to seek my input, and I reciprocate by getting their input on the feasibility of designs early in the process. I remain open to there suggestions, realizing the need to balance the optimum user experience with the amount of time and effort required to produce it. We all compromise to find a reasonable solution. I’ve learned to pick my fights.
I’m currently involved in an Agile project. We aren’t an Agile shop, but this process was mandated by our customer. Due to the fact that I’m stretched rather thin across a handful of projects, I’m struggling to stay ahead of the developers. Sometimes, I can only feed them a few sketches and a verbal description, rather than the detailed specifications I would prefer. I’m having to choose which parts of the UI really need to be fully fleshed out.
Agile is, without question, and engineering-centric model. However, its iterative nature does reflect the design process I try to follow. It seems to me that there could be a natural blending of interaction design processes and Agile methods, but to be successful, it must be a balanced union, rather than the examples I most often read and hear about, in which design is shoe-horned in. For the value of good design to be fully realized, much of it must be done up front, before implementation begins. As Bill Buxton stated in his Keynote, “The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived it yesterday.”