Learning from the ladies’ room is a tale of indecipherable design in a place where most of us would really like the design to be obvious. It’s also a guide into a world most men don’t get a glimpse into, and hopefully a lesson in user hacks and how to prevent them.
Now on The Interconnected: Rhythms and Risings
Part love letter to the company I’m leaving after 16 years, part political commentary on the rough roads American has walked during those 16 years and the recent election of Donald Trump, my most recent post on The Interconnected, Rhythms and risings, talks about incremental change and staying the course
Now on The Interconnected: Doing Agile Wrong: When Is Big Up-Front Design Right?
The last of my three rants about Big Up-Front Design discusses the conditions in which big up-front design is a really good idea.
It’s not always be a good idea to do big up-front design. Conversely, it’s not always a good idea to skip it. Th trick with this technique as with all techniques is to know when to use it and when not to.
Now on The Interconnected: a review of ForgeConf
I attended ForgeConf, a one-day conference about making and designing for the web. Because I believe excellence should be celebrated, I wrote a review for for the conference on The Interconnected.
Tickets normally go on sale in January or February so keep an eye out if you’re in the Philadelphia area.
Now on The Interconnected: Doing Agile Wrong: Design is not Development
I’ve tweeted a couple of times about a project I’m on where we’re doing a big up-front design. It’s a long project.
Every time I have, someone has replied back to me to tell me that if I’m doing a big up-front design, I’m not doing Agile correctly and I’m going to get burned.
Outside of the fact that it’s incredibly rude to tweet someone and tell them that their process (which the vast majority of us working in big companies get no control over) is wrong, there’s a problem here: there’s nothing wrong with big up-front design.
Explaining why front-loading a development process with a design process has been more difficult than I expected. My first draft was long and rambling. Turned out I really had three posts hiding within it.
My October 7 article for The Interconnected, Doing Agile Wrong: Design is not Development describes the difference between Agile and UX. It’ll be followed by an article on the difference between big up-front software design and big up-front product design. Then sometime after that, we’ll post the final article, which explains when big up-front (product) design is right for a project.