Combining Systematic UI Design and Scrum

Table of Contents

Format: lecture/experience report
Duration: 60 minutes

Abstract

Agile methods help software teams to deliver value to the customer starting from the first weeks of the project. Systematic user interface design ensures that the resulting software actually solves the problems of its intended users with a minimal, efficient and intuitive user interface. Combining these two has had astonishingly good results at Reaktor, but the good combination hasn't been as straightforward as adding UI design work into the development sprints.

I will talk and show examples about

  • what is systematic UI design (the GUIDe process)
  • how to design UIs in an agile, iterative fashion
  • how we have combined the UI design with implementation (Scrum, Kanban) at Reaktor
  • what have been the benefits and challenges in our experience

Detailed description

  • what is systematic UI design (the GUIDe process)
    • what does UI design mean in comparison to usability, user experience design, graphics etc.
  • what is the problem that UI design in GUIDe solves - and what it is not
  • how to design UIs in an agile, iterative fashion
    • a short demo of designing - or even deriving - a UI for a simple application in a test-first manner
  • how we have combined the UI design with implementation (Scrum, Kanban) at Reaktor
  • what have been the benefits and challenges in our experience
    • examples from real projects: what was done and why; what went wrong, what worked; remaining problems, unanswered questions

Biography

Karri-Pekka Laakso designs user interfaces at Reaktor. He's responsibility is to find out what the software should do and then design functionality, logic and data of the user interface so that the goal can be accomplished efficiently and intuitively. During the last 13 years, Karri has been designing UIs, developing design methods, teaching UI design at universities and company courses, and implementing UIs for desktop applications and web. He is one of the developers of the GUIDe process model for UI design.
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Comments (2)

 

  1. Jul 30, 2009

    Vasco Duarte says:

    Can you describe what you mean by "systematic"? It seems to have a precise meani...

    Can you describe what you mean by "systematic"? It seems to have a precise meaning in your abstract but I cannot understand what it is.

    How do you incorporate late changes to the UI in the development process would also be interesting.

    Finally, can you describe what type of projects your process has been applied to? Has it been applied to Consumer products or just enterprise products?

  2. Sep 22, 2009

    Karri-Pekka Laakso says:

    Thanks, Vasco, for your comments. I managed to miss them somehow in July and not...

    Thanks, Vasco, for your comments. I managed to miss them somehow in July and noticed them only now. I'll answer them in my presentation as well, but in short:

    • Systematic means that the result can be shown to be derived from some other source of information, in this case the users' tasks and workflows. The features are *never* a result of brain storming, for example - they all serve a well defined task. This has also the property that there are no unnecessary features.
    • Late changes will definetely be addressed explicitly, but they are taken into account as any change during the design phase. The UI spec, though meant to be a complete description of the software, is by no means a document that cannot be changed. It is changed whenever it is needed.
    • The process works alike (and has been applied alike) to consumer and b-to-b projects, but it requires a well defined set of tasks; it is necessary that there is a well-defined goal that we are making easier for the user to reach. It's not applicable for situations where the user just wants to browse something, have fun etc. (ill defined tasks/goals) or where there is a huge amount of tasks whose priority and typicality is not known very well (cases like designing the navigation structure of a large web site).