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Sketching is a really, really important part of the UCD process, in my opinion. It allows us to communicate, and get feedback on, ideas and approaches quickly and with little cost.

However, not everyone is initially comfortable doing it. People may feel that they can’t really draw, and are uncomfortable sharing rough sketches, as they feel that it isn’t good enough. You can tell people all you like that fidelity is not important, that it’s about communicating an idea – but that doesn’t always work.

I believe that, in order to move a team to a more sketch led culture, this is the first hurdle that must be overcome. An idea that I got from my colleague and friend Lee McIvor (@leemcivor) is to play a form of Pictionary. And this is exactly what we do at our team meetings here at TUI.

I choose a different theme each time (brand names, cities, household items), write a dozen or so on pieces of paper, split the group into 2 teams and start the game. The teams play head to head, the first to guess the answer correctly gets a point. It’s a playful way of showing that sketching is about conveying a concept quickly and not worrying about fidelity.

This technique not only breaks down that sketching barrier, but it also helps to bring the teams together more. Most of all, it’s fun, and that’s important.

However, it’s just the first step to instilling a sketching culture; the next step is making sure that the process has a sketching step and project plans give time for this.

Image courtesy of magicmarie at stock.xchng

I recently had a “conversation” on Facebook with a colleague here at Channel4 and a friend from Ireland. They had responded to a status update (courtesy of twitter) which said that I was having an interesting conversation about Agile UX with a couple of people over a beer.

How User Experience fits within an Agile process is something that I’ve been really interested in and, indeed, in a former role I was part of the PIG (Process Improvement Group) where we came up with our flavour of Agile which ingrained UX into the methodology.

User stories:

All stories need to be user centric in my opinion, “As a user I want to…”. The means that your development process is completely user centric and end to end. I’ve seen this done as an Epic being the user centric component and the Stories and Tasks being more system focussed . Agile is flexible, the methodology can be tailored to suit your needs… As long as the user is at the center!

Iteration Zero:

The all important one. This needs to be a few weeks at the very least, depending on the size of the project. This is where the IA and UX work gets done and the design work. Here’s where I may get some criticism, but I don’t think that estimates and actuals from Iteration/Integration Zero should be used to calculate your multiplier. This is the thinking, experimenting, prototyping, brainstorming and researching phase. It’s different to the build phase.

But, it should be iterative in itself (which is why I prefer the term Integration Zero). Try ideas, discard, try something new… cycle and iterate.

More

I am really enjoying IA TV, a blog I subscribe to and visit regularly. This blog posts regular videos of speeches, presentations and interviews from leading people in the fields of Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Seach/SEO, User Centered Design/Human Factors, Usability and User Experience. Some are very short 3 or 4 minute videos, some are longer – all of the ones I’ve watched so far have been enjoyable.

I’ve embedded (with appropriate link backs!) a couple already – but I really enjoyed this one by Bill Moggridge on design as a collaborative process: