Speaker Spotlight: Austin Govella and Hacking UX
There’s a dirty secret in the turf war between agile, lean, and waterfall: they each use the same product development process. What’s
different isn’t their process, but how they apply design activities in different ways to eke out design value in different places.
So how can you alter the design process? Even better, how can you best customize the process to provide more value for the way your organization works? More importantly, how should you change the design process from sprint to sprint to get the most value out of your design activities?
How do you hack user experience?
Answer? It’s all about velocity, and you have four levers you can use to control your UX velocity and how you get value out of the design process:
- Audience
- Fidelity
- Annotation
- Communication
For each of these levers, we’ll examine how they inter-relate, how they govern the value you can get from design activities, and the issues and questions you should consider when hacking the user experience process.
This talk won’t be about nifty methods or collaboration or white boards or prototypes. When we’re done, you will leave with a toolbox for continually hacking the design process. You’ll understand why some nifty methods work for others and not for you. You’ll understand how to hack your own nifty methods that will work best for your team. And most of all, you’ll learn how to teach everyone on your team how to hack the design process.
I attended this lecture and was completely disappointed. The lecture was 15 minutes long, the presentor didnt have enough knowledge to awnser the 45 minutes of questions that followed the presentation. He provided no insight into his process, nor did he possess any real design theory. The grand manifesto was ” lower the fidelity of your wireframes”.
Are you joking? That’s the best approach to working in an agile environment? What other approaches have you tried? Where’s the process?
Ouch. But totally fair. I cut a lot of material to fit a 1.5 hour presentation into a shorter amount of time. And that definitely left a lot of holes. This presentation is much more of an intro to the main idea: control your fidelity to achieve the best results.
As I mentioned, this presentation was a shorter version of a longer presentation. The fully-baked presentation with full detail is available on Slideshare:
* http://www.slideshare.net/austingovella/hacking-ux-25091564