Fitting Big-Picture UX into Agile Development by Smashing Magazine “Why bother adding a design owner? In mature organizations with multiple product offerings that share a unified visual, interactive or brand language, design owner may be responsible for consistency issues that etend beyond a given project. Design decisions and product decisions might be at odds, and making transparent the process of these two constituents discussing and exposing the acceptability of solutions is key to the transparency of the design sprint.” “design prioritization is a different beast than product prioritization.” “The goal of each [design] spike is not to produce potentially releasable code, but rather to provide actionable design decisions in the form of wireframes, mockups, prototypes or research.” “The development team still functions as an autonomous decision-making unit. They simply now have the benefit of a holistically designed foundation on which to build.”
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Fitting Big-Picture UX into Agile Development by Smashing Magazine

“Why bother adding a design owner? In mature organizations with multiple product offerings that share a unified visual, interactive or brand language, design owner may be responsible for consistency issues that etend beyond a given project. Design decisions and product decisions might be at odds, and making transparent the process of these two constituents discussing and exposing the acceptability of solutions is key to the transparency of the design sprint.”

“design prioritization is a different beast than product prioritization.”

“The goal of each [design] spike is not to produce potentially releasable code, but rather to provide actionable design decisions in the form of wireframes, mockups, prototypes or research.”

“The development team still functions as an autonomous decision-making unit. They simply now have the benefit of a holistically designed foundation on which to build.”

Source: uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com

We’re a team of furniture designers and business strategists with a mission. Most furniture we see is too expensive, poorly designed, or falls apart within the first couple of months. That really, REALLY bothers us.

Aellon is built on four principles of good design: functionality, durability, sustainability and accessiblity. In other words, our furniture is sexy but simple, lasts generations, is environmentally and socially friendly, and won’t break the bank.

Source: indiegogo.com

People often make of design as some sort of commercial spawn of art. It is not. Design is a discipline in itself, related to engineering, that uses some of art’s syntax. It is different from engineering in the sense that engineering looks after the efficiency and robustness of the product, and design looks at the interaction between the product and the human being.
Mark MacKay, Interaction Designer and co-creator of Method of Action, featured in Distance 02

UX reading on the bus

The Dominance of Marketing

Unfortunately, marketing-driven cultures often engage in feature wars with competitors. Sales demands the addition of features that will help them to close specific sales deals—perhaps to satisfy the demands of just one customer. Some product managers prioritize adding new features above all else, and the user experiences of their products fall prey to featuritis. Such forces are hard to resist, but it is incumbent on UX teams to do everything they can to dissuade product teams from creating products that are bloated with features most users won’t find useful.

The Dominance of Engineering

“In engineering-driven cultures, engineers have the ultimate power as the final arbiters of what goes into a digital product.”

In engineering-driven cultures, engineers have the ultimate power as the final arbiters of what goes into a digital product. After all, they’re the ones who actually build software products. In such cultures, products are commonly not implemented to spec. Engineers often feel free to “cherry pick a spec”—as Kim Goodwin has described this phenomenon—and implement only the parts of a specification they choose to follow.

Or perhaps, as Luke Wroblewski described in his column on UXmatters, “Developing the Invisible,” what you “get back is half of the design. By half of the design I mean that all of the features, content, and functions are there, and they are working as designed. … What’s missing is what’s invisible: alignment and whitespace.” These are subtleties that some engineers do not appreciate or care to bother about.

I read stuff like this all the time…but now I can laugh about how it’s all true based on my own experience. I’ve gone through similar situations of both of these scenarios and they’re both interesting animals.

Source: hieutrung.com

We have more processing power, affordable tools, and combined intelligence right this very minute than at any point in the history of design. We are using it to build shit. It’s time to aim higher. Let’s find problems to solve that actually improve people’s lives.
Mike Monteiro from .net Magazine, quote featured in Distance 02
Re-think the way you’ve been working. Break your old habits. For example, rather than generating a 50-slide PowerPoint to sell your new digital concept, facilitate a conversation with your team in a workshop. Rather than presenting a fully baked concept, sketch something out for early feedback. Present a prototype for user feedback instead of launching a fully functional application. Get out of the design vacuum, bring other perspectives to the table, and ideally, get others to reconsider how they’ve been working to date.
Peyton Lindley for Fast Co. Design

Source: fastcodesign.com