CHIFOO Meeting: Making Sense of User-Centered Design and Agile May 6, 2009

Love it or hate it, everyone seems to be talking about Agile. Agile is used at scrappy startups that are iteratively defining their products and markets and at large companies with complex business problems working with internationally distributed teams. In each of these different settings, some folks are strong advocates of Agile, while some are still skeptics. Some people in the User-Centered Design (UCD) community dismiss Agile as a fad, others have embraced it whole-heartedly. Can these two worlds intersect? What is the role of UCD techniques in an agile project? Are any best practices emerging?

In this talk, Jeff and Lane will draw on their personal experience to share the characteristics of successful (and unsuccessful!) blends of UCD and Agile techniques.

After this talk, you’ll be able to answer these questions:
• What do UCD people need to know about Agile?
• What do Agile people need to know about UCD?
• What are the pain points?
• How can Agile and UCD methods be used together?

Schedule:
CHIFOOd: meet us for no-host dinner and conversation at La Merde at Bistro Montage -- 5 - 6:30 pm
Registration at CubeSpace, 622 SE Grand -- 6:30 - 7 pm
Meeting, followed by Q & A -- 7 - 9 pm

About the Speakers

Lane Halley is a Principal Design Consultant with Cooper in San Francisco, CA. Her career spans the formative years of the interaction design profession. Prior to joining Cooper in 1997, Lane worked in marketing, training development, technical account management, and product management roles at SSC, Microsoft, Mindscape, and SenSage. While at Cooper, she has helped companies ranging from start-ups to large corporations create compelling design solutions for enterprise and consumer applications, websites, and devices, and is a popular teacher of CooperU courses. Lane believes that interaction design is a bridge between product management and development, and that user experience design informs and enhances Agile product development.

For the past fifteen years, Jeff Patton has designed and developed software on a wide variety of projects, from online aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records. A winner of the Agile Alliance’s 2007 Gordon Pask Award for contributions to Agile development, Jeff has focused on Agile approaches since working on an early Extreme Programming team in 2000. He has specialized in the application of user-centered design techniques to improve requirements, planning, and products for Agile projects. His recent writing on the subject can be found at www.agileproductdesign.com and in Alistair Cockburn’s Crystal Clear. His forthcoming book gives tactical advice to those seeking to deliver useful, usable, and valuable software.

Official Website: http://www.chifoo.org/index.php/chifoo/events_detail/making_sense_of_user_centered_design_and_agile/