Process

I’ve found the Agile Development community has a lot in common with the user-centered design community, and their methods — especially the spirit of them — is closely aligned. In case you haven’t been following their evolution, many different methods from Scrum to Extreme Programming sprang up and, seeing commonalities among them, the founders came…

In GM’s Design Push Picks Up Speed David Welch profiles Bob Lutz’s struggle to balance the priorities of accounting, engineering and design in an enterprise. This bit pressed the clutch down in my brain: One of the first things Lutz did on arriving in September, 2001, was push designers and engineers to stop fighting and…

I’m doing research on high-performance teams that can evolve how they work to changing environments. I see it in the best designers, agile programmers, engineers and others. And I’m not too surprised to see it in Skunk Works, a book about the famous Lockheed Advanced Development Projects group. The man who ran the group during…

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.” — Douglas Adams It’s ironic that making simple products is difficult, but it is. It requires discipline to design simple products,…

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.” — Donald Knuth I think you can replace the word programming with the word design and that would still be true.

Brett tracks the coinage of the phrase beta is the new black. While the idea isn’t news to the web-savvy, it’s still a scary concept to product developers in the corporate world.

A friend just reminded me of a story from some time ago. I was giving a short presentation at a financial services company on the user-centered design process. The audience was a project team. I threw up some slides illustrating the various activities: researching users, designing the interface, implementing it, etc. Toward the end, the…

iLife let’s you be composer and editor with production capabilities that required an entire studio 15 years ago. The next logical step in consumer production is full-on film direction, a combination of simulation and multimedia that completes the DIY promise. An example of what amateurs are hacking together is Mike Fraser’s 100 years (Windows Media),…

Laurie Vertelney writes in after seeing my take on the Origin of Personas. …It seems like we’d been using scenarios for ages to do design work at Apple and at HP Labs before that. (mid-late 80s) I was personally inspired by some of the work at MITs Architecture Machine Group back in the early 80’s……

Thanks to Zap — who invited me to a panel on design methods (.ppt) at the IA Summit — I finally got my hands on a copy of Jay Doblin’s A Short, Grandiose Theory of Design, an article from the 1987 STA Design Journal. In its seven pages Doblin presents a straightforward and persuasive argument…