As far as web design in Lansing goes, I consider myself one of the most vocal advocates for user experience design. When I saw Ian Armstrong’s article on the evolution of UX, I was sure that other folks doing web design in Lansing would want to learn more – Check out Ian’s article here. Additionally, I will add a few of my own points based on my reading of the article, but a full read is a must.
Ian states that “in its purest form, UX Design is waterfall based.” These days, in most circles where folks are talking about UX, ‘waterfall’ is a dirty word that hearkens back to rigid PMBOK processes and exhaustingly long requirements gathering sessions, but Ian’s absolutely right. You have to get a sense of requirements, gather perspectives, mock things up, test out assumptions, wash, rinse, repeat. It’s waterfall. There’s no way around it.
Ian nails one of the key problems with being outcome based, what we work towards with agile vs. requirements based. This is a conundrum that many of have faced and still work to reconcile: “Whereas classic UX is requirements based, Lean UX is outcome based… Designers found themselves under immense pressure to fill a sprint backlog before they really understood what they were building. As a result, a lot of development cycles got burned on features that never made it into the final product.”
So much development and rework lost trying to anticipate product needs… <sigh>
I’ve read a lot about the Google Ventures Design Sprint, and attended a session at an O’Reilly Design conference where they talked about it, but even then, Ian’s explanation is as succinct and spot-on as any I’ve come across:
“Google Ventures conceived the design sprint, which allowed teams to rapidly define and test a low-fidelity prototypes. This jump-started the Lean UX cycle on emerging product teams and effectively eliminated the waste and rework problem.”
I’ll put a pin it there. Check out Ian’s original article.
If you’re looking for web design in Lansing that puts your user’s experience at the center of their work, then get in touch today.
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