Collaboration with development is a handshake, not a handoff

We recently spent 14 months designing an investment platform for traders and portfolio managers. As you might imagine, this was a large and complex application that required a tremendous amount of collaboration with the client. Our team consisted of a design communicator, an interaction designer, two visual designers and an engagement lead. We spent many hours with subject matter experts (SMEs), business analysts (BAs) and developers, crafting a solution that satisfied the needs and goals of seven user personas (and because their real-world counterparts were also employees of our client, actual users reviewed our work every step of the way). This article describes some of the key techniques we employed to ensure that the interaction design was something our client's development team could implement (I'll focus on our collaboration about interaction design; visual design was a key component of this highly visual interface, and deserves its own article).

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Six Sigma and Goal-Directed Design

If you work for a large company, or have one as a client, you've probably heard about Six Sigma. Many companies report great success using Six Sigma initiatives to improve the quality of their products and services, measured by increased customer satisfaction and millions of dollars saved.

At the core, Six Sigma and Goal-Directed design share some of the same values and provide tools to solve some of the same problems. Six Sigma seeks to understand and quantify the functions that matter most to users and provide improvements in those most leveraged areas. Goal-Directed design seeks to delight users and increase loyalty by creating products that are powerful and pleasurable to use. Six Sigma identifies and tracks faults "critical to quality" (CTQs). Goal-Directed design uses personas and goals to define and communicate interaction design decisions.

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Early and Often: How to Avoid the Design Revision Death Spiral

Introduction

One lesson we've learned over the past several years here at Cooper is that on the vast majority of our projects, intimate client collaboration is a critical ingredient for success. This is a lesson that we have sometimes learned the hard way; collaboration can be messy, unpredictable and has often forced us to compromise what we thought was a supremely clear and elegant vision. Despite these growing pains, we have now come to embrace the unpredictability and compromise; through well-managed client collaboration, our designs are stronger and are more likely to serve our clients' needs and satisfy the goals of end users.

It is the aim of this Practice Study to discuss the methods we have adopted to get maximum benefit from our clients' expertise and feedback while maintaining creative momentum and achieving our milestones and deadlines.

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Designing for Offshore Development

Everyone's talking about outsourcing and offshore development these days. It's been on the cover of major newsweeklies, featured prominently on the West Wing television show, and a topic of conversation around boardrooms and discussion groups. Regardless of your personal position on trade policy, globalization looks like it's going to be a fact of life in the software industry.

As an Interaction Designer, I'm not responsible for actually building the products I design. However, I find it increasingly clear that outsourcing creates a significant impact on the entire software design and construction process. Offshore development is in its infancy, but will continue to evolve to become an increasingly effective way to go about certain kinds of software construction. Based on recent project work, this article describes a number of observations worth considering as you ponder how outsourcing and offshore development may fit into your plans.

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RUP & Goal-Directed Design: Toward a New Development Process

Abstract

Interaction design methodologies, such as Goal-Directed Design, tackle the software development process from the top down by defining specific product requirements and interface behavior based on research and user needs. The Rational Unified Process (RUP) and other programming methodologies attack software development from the bottom up. RUP creates fluid efficiencies for iterating product development during the construction phase in order to react to changing product requirements while still producing shipping code.

Although different, the two approaches are both successful ways to manage software product development. Do development organizations need to choose one methodology over the other? Or are the two development strategies complementary?

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5 Insights for Improving Product Development Cycle Success

In my article last month, Innovate, one step at a time, I discussed how the process of innovation easily derails during difficult economic times, such as today's. When creating software and digital products, innovation typically spans many months, and it can become disrupted by unobservable or frequently changing business conditions that make it extremely difficult to form and evaluate viable options. When people can't see where they're going, they typically just stop. This is tragic with respect to innovation, since it is innovation that propels business and society forward.

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