Some companies take a quite structured approach to creating user experiences. Others create user experiences unwittingly. Looking back, I detected a couple more or less successful organizational patterns in regards to creating user experiences.
Continue readingThe thing about requirements – an agile answer
Requirements focus on value. Developing valuable products and services sounds like a good plan to me. So requirements are important. But what is a requirements and what are “good” or “bad” ones? My initial research left me more confused than informed. So I set forth to find the ultimate answer. I found it. It is 42. I realized, many thanks to Deep Thought, that I need to pursue a different question: how can we lead an effective conversation and what should we talk about.
The case of a relevant UX problem
This is not about a Sherlock Holmes mystery and no engineer lost a thumb over it. Even though the machinery involved could easily achieve the latter. It is about industrial robots and tons of machinery to fold metal sheets into origami swans. But mainly it is about a case where creating the right user experience solved the relevant problem.
Continue readingThe purpose of …
Sometimes we do stuff without actually understanding the purpose behind it. We write user stories because we do and we miss the gist of it. Why are we doing it? Or to be more precise: what for?
Continue readingCustomers, users or fans?
The stuff I find most exciting is making something work for the users or to put it in more modern terms: people have a great experience when using something I helped create. So I focus on users and user experience. Some people rather talk about customers and customer experience. Whatever the name, it is basically the same isn’t it?
UX in a burn-out system – UX Brunch in Zürich
At the UX Brunch in Zürich on December 6, 2019 Rahel and I held a presentation and some very engaged discussions on how we as UX professionals ourselves heat-up the burn-out systems we are caught in. Here is a summary including some of the slides of this session.
By Markus und Rahel *)
Continue readingDialogue in a park
It’s quite easy to rush through creativity workshops enumerating, rating and selecting ideas to hand-over for later implementation. This article is however about a different kind of creativity, the creativity that comes from gaining deeper understanding – together in a workshop.
By Beatrice*) and Markus
Continue readingTeam disorder: Featuritis
Teams form an entity – and they can have disorders. There are a couple of team disorders worth looking at. One of them is Featuritis. And here is the not really serious medical guide to this disorder.
Agile conversation or requirements engineering?!
Requirements engineering (RE) has a long and successful tradition. Different approaches always existed. Still it is optimized for an artifact driven setup: Individuals pass on documents. Agile practices are however geared for an interaction drive setup where individuals form one “super-brain”. The discussion about requirements is part of the agile conversation. And now, the proven approaches from RE suddenly create friction and bad smells. So, should we forget about requirements?
Collaboration creates teams
Getting a performant team needs an investment into the team. Agile inspect and adapt is meant to do the trick. Instead of frantically or stoically pulling a cart with square wheels, a team should be able to spot the fault in the system and improve. Observation: teams surprisingly often do not do so.
Burn-out machine game @ agile breakfast in Zürich
On March 6, I had the opportunity to play the burn-out machine game with about 40 agile consultants in Zürich. We spent two hours with engaged discussions and insights about the very serious and highly relevant topic burn-out. We even had a good time doing so.
https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/Agile-Breakfast-Zurich/
The team wall – or agile knowledge management
Here’s the situation: A customer asked us to improve the quality of their core system so that they again can act on the demands of their users and customers in a timely manner. We had a team room at our disposal and we again made extensive use of the walls. It turned out that the team wall made the difference!
Keep knowledge alive – living documentation
Keeping knowledge about a product alive is no easy task. Software teams struggle with manually mainting vast documentation in UML tools, text documents, wiki sites and more. We all know about the amount of effort and dedication needed to do this well given the amount of redundancy. There is a promising vision of a living documentation, i.e. a documentaiton automagically created from those things the teams create anyway, like automated and manual tests, backlog items, meeting protocols and more.
The Team Squeezer or the story of an agile transition
An important management tool to improve team performance is the Team Squeezer. It’s really simple: just use hierarchical power and exert pressure to make the development team hurry up. Usually the Team Squeezer backfires.
Powerful Stories
The stars to road innovation framework wouldn’t be complete without the concept of stories. The story decides the fate of the innovation. It can prove to be very powerful.
Meet with users to create great products
Even though – as a UX professional – I must stress the importance of meeting users, I have to admit that the title of this article is not exactly accurate and just meeting users is not really the point. Having revealed this, I should probably explain what really matters when meeting users and give some indication on how to do it. This article covers two stars to road essentials: the UCD cycle and the UX levels.
Lets start at the beginning and lets review a first big challenge creators of great products are facing:
Continue readingBill & Chuck – and how they fight ideas into the market
Let me introduce two characters, Bill and Chuck. To be honest, they are personae distilled from people you could meet. They are especially interesting because of their behavior: Instead of collaborating to let ideas compete they fight to get their ideas into the market. And sadly, they have good reasons to do so.
Lets collaborate with our partners!
At the recent Agile Unconference in Zürich I came across the concept of lean agile procurement. The key insight for me was: forget preparing RFPs, rather establish a good relationship with a select list of partners.
The big thing about SAFe
If you never have had a look at the scaled agile framework, you may want to do so. It’s has some really good concepts in it. Still with all the enthusiasm I feel like being drawn back to the good old times of software engineering. And you know why?
Five or one guidelines for the minimal viable product
In our current project, we use an approach of the minimal viable product and we steer it with the story mapping technique. From the discussions in our team, here are five guidelines (or just one?) for such an endeavor to ensure a better work-life-balance.
