Falling Off A Blog

Good vs great design - Cameron Moll

Cameron Moll, the first speaker after lunch at dConstruct, is currently Interaction Design Manager at the headquarters of the Mormon church in Salt Lake City.

A trick question: What takes longer, heating water in a microwave for 1minute 10 seconds or heating water in a microwave for 1 minute 11 seconds?

Answer: heating water for 1 minute 10 seconds (Dur - i said it was a trick question). Why? Because getting a microwave to run for 1 min 11 seconds involves hitting the same button (1) 3 times, whereas making it run for 1 min 10 seconds involves hitting 2 different buttons (1 and 0) - finding the extra button typically takes a user more than 1 second.

Waterfall bad, washing machine good - Leisa Reichelt

Leisa Reiselt was the final speaker before lunch - she blogs at disambiguity.com.

At the end of a rather mundane presentation on the advantages of agile development over the waterfall approach, Leisa raised a challenge: how can we combine the principles of agile development with those of user-centred design? The short development cycles or sprints in agile development don't leave much time to involve real users in the process.

Leisa's suggestion is to combine development work with testing, user feedback and research in each sprint, and to lengthen sprints to make this practical. So, in a given sprint the developers would be working on the next changes in functionality, while at the same time the user design people would be getting user feedback on the development work done in the last sprint. Simultaneously part of the team would be doing research to help define what needed to be done in future sprints.

Seems like an interesting idea - certainly worth taking to the next stage and trying it out.

dConstruct

Today I'm in Brighton, at the dConstruct conference organised by ClearLeft. Ahead of me is a whole day discussing how to build the next generation of web experiences.