[LRUG] Agile and User centred design

[Beaton, Malcolm]

Thanks everyone for the feedback on a grossly off topic discussion. I
would love to say the citations give me hope but they do paint a rather
bleak picture. 

I wrote the following before I read all the responses so advance
apologies for the waffle

Yes - I see that approach with a lot of designers (Usually in my
experience the more rubbish ones) When I was working as a designer the
client always changes their mind - So you re design and re design. The
key to this is to start rough and gradually as you flesh out towards
finished you and the client begin to agree and the "Finished" work is
what they wanted.

Which I loved as a designer. 

As a developer I used to think that that approach was so much more
efficient than the BIG SPEC approach and why didn't we do it in software
development - Thats about when agile came along and I was (Still am) so
excited about it. I find it amazing that design for new media seems to
have gone the other way!

When Desktop publishing took off there was a massive wave of brave new
world as people packed up their copy cameras and wax pens - Fired their
illustrators and announced that all we knew about design was obsolete -
After a few years people started to realise the reason design worked was
artistic and not technological and just because you could apply every PS
filter under the sun didn't actually mean you should. The end result is
the tool is different but the way it works is much the same as it always
was, Just faster.

I wonder if the New Media guys have thrown the baby out with the
bathwater and are again saying "Well that's how it used to work but this
is totally different" and having seen that mantra gradually be debunked
several times before I can't help but think they are going to "Discover"
with great fan fare all the things they are now saying don't apply. Or
maybe I'm just an old fart these days :-)

I still feel that a designer or experience person who can't work towards
a vision with their client from rough to finished should maybe get
another job. After weeks of getting the design "Just right" how often is
it and how often has "The client just not understood the genius of their
design"

Chris - You are more of a designer than you give yourself credit for ;-)
(And I am beginning to feel this is truer of all the agile developers
than the designers) 



-----Original Message-----
From: chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org [mailto:chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org]
On Behalf Of Chris Roos
Sent: 30 January 2009 10:21
To: London Ruby Users Group
Subject: Re: [LRUG] Agile and User centred design

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Beaton, Malcolm
<Malcolm.Beaton at conchango.com> wrote:
>
<snip>
>
> I personally feel - Design is iterative, Agile is iterative so there
> really shouldn't be a problem? But it seems some disagree and I can't
see
> how to bring them round?

I completely agree that design should be iterative (but then I'm a
developer, not a designer).  I'm happy to develop half-arsed stuff and
get it deployed as quickly as possible, in order to learn and iterate
on a 'working' code base.  I've certainly met designers that don't
like this approach: everything has to be 'just right' before
releasing.  I'm afraid I can't offer any advice as to how to solve it.

Chris
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