(This was originally published on Playwell, Alan's personal blog.)

Elisabeth Hendrickson has recently opened a new test-and-development training facility in Pleasanton CA called Agilistry. It’s bright and airy, well-lit and well-stocked, and it feels like home the minute you walk in. In order to publicize her new facility, she very generously hosted a week-long intensive learning exercise.

She invited eleven different people with widely varied skill sets, backgrounds, and interests. She challenged them to build a website in five days using the best practices of interaction design, agile programming, and test-driven-development. We christened it “AgileUpToHere” (#au2h) and it exceeded everyone’s expectations (you can see our results here).

Since it was my 15-year-old homophone web site that was being rebuilt, I nominally played the role of product owner, but I was an observer, an instigator, a goad, and a participant. It’s hard to remember when I had so much fun or learned so much. If you want to learn to be great, I strongly recommend Elisabeth and Agilistry.

Things I learned:

1. After 25 years, it’s time to lose the Windows computer and get a Mac.


2. Good agile developers are self confident; confident enough to trust interaction designers to do interaction design without distrustful oversight.


3. There are lots of programmers who understand that relational databases are not the only approach to solving problems.


4. It is time to build software.


5. Test-driven-development isn’t fully understood. In fact, software testing isn’t fully understood.


6. When even the leanest developer in the room sees really high quality BDUF (big design up front) for the first time, they get all woo-woo and want some for themselves.


7. Getting good software built demands the contributions of many different personalities, competencies, and roles, most of which are new and as-yet ill-defined.


8. Two programmers pairing can create more and better code in less time than one programmer can (I already knew this, but it’s always good to see it in action).


9. Even this jaded old fart can still get excited about changing the world.


10. There are many undiscovered and unfilled product niches on the Web, and one of them is “quality”.


11. People want a leader with a vision.


12. Elisabeth Hendrickson (@testobsessed) is a magical woman. To paraphrase Tom Robbins, “she’s been around the world eight times and met everybody twice.” Like a great chef or symphony conductor, Elisabeth knows how to combine the unexpected to create the sublime. She brought together a dozen people from all over the country, each with different skills, background, desires, and expectations, and then she blended them together into a cohesive, happy, effective team.


13. The pre-written code I arrived with was called “legacy” with a grimace, and was quarantined until discarded. Moral: Non-TDD (test-driven development) code is properly regarded like a ticking time bomb.


14. For interaction design, you can’t have too many white boards, made from porcelain-coated steel, firmly mounted to the wall. For agile development, that isn’t such a big deal.


15. Story-mapping is a major component of the bridge between interaction design and agile development.


16. Story-tracking software isn’t quite there yet.

The Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO) hosted Lane Halley and Jeff Patton for a talk and workshop on blending agile practices and user-centered design. On Wednesday night, May 6th, Lane and Jeff presented a talk titled “Making Sense of User-Centered Design and Agile.” Thursday, May 7th, Lane and Jeff taught a full-day workshop titled “All Together Now: Blending Interaction Design and Agile Development Techniques.”

The slides from the May 6th talk are available on SlideShare. Pictures of the May 7th workshop are available on Flickr.

Last night, our own Kim Goodwin presented her talk "Designing a Unified Experience" at the IxDA NYC, generously hosted by our friends at LiquidNet.

(Click the button on the bottom right of the "screen" for a fullscreen view.)

About the talk

Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.

The Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO) hosts Lane Halley and Jeff Patton in Portland for a talk and workshop on blending agile and user-centered design. On Wednesday night, May 6th, Lane and Jeff present a talk titled “Making Sense of User-Centered Design and Agile.” On Thursday, May 7th, they'll teach a full-day workshop titled “All Together Now: Blending Interaction Design and Agile Development Techniques.” Here's more information about the course and registration details. We hope to see you there!

For those who aren’t familiar with South by Southwest, it’s a huge three-track conference that occurs in Austin, Texas each year around mid March. (It’s timed to coincide with UT’s spring break, which makes room for the conventioneers and avoids student-professional brawling.) The first track is music, and lots of bands come and play live, hoping for more fans and maybe a deal from talent scouts. The second track is film, and in addition to a regular set of conference panels and presentations, there is a concurrent film festival going on at the city’s many rockin’ cinemas. The third track is interactive (SxSWi), with conference presentations and a whole lot more.

Kim Goodwin delivered the closing keynote at interaction 09 on Sunday, and it's now available on Slideshare.

Clarification: We've posted only the slides and notes on Slideshare. We'll post a link to the video of the presentation when it is available on the IxDA website.

The title of the presentation is "Each One, Teach One," and it discusses the future direction of interaction design as a profession. We've seen demand for our services increase dramatically over the past few years, and, in order to continue to respond to this demand, we need to make more of us. Part of the solution involves creating academic programs to provide the foundation for learning the craft of interaction design; another part is to create a culture of mentorship. This means that all of us need to learn to teach what we do.

As Kim says, "[Being a good mentor] takes good listening, observation, and collaboration skills. It takes imagination, because you have to see the potential in someone who isn’t yet able to demonstrate everything they’re capable of. It takes a willingness to explore and wander a bit instead of going down the path of least resistance."

Check it out, and tell us what you think.

Taking on big problems

Join us for a beer at the spectacular Autodesk Design Gallery to celebrate the release of Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services, the definitive field guide of Cooper's design tools and techniques written by our own Kim Goodwin.

Weds, February 18
6:00 - 8:00

One Market Street
Suite 200
San Francisco
(here's a map)

Please feel free to bring your colleagues, friends and anyone else who's as excited about the practice of design as we are.

Building security requires that all attendees be on the guest list. Please let us know if you'll be able to join us by RSVPing here:

http://crush3r.com/page/pcgsgmmtum
(Anyone can RSVP — just send this along to your friends)

For more about the book, Kim posted a sneak peek at the contents a couple weeks back. And of course, you can pre-order on Amazon.

Luke Hohmann, author of Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play will be here at Cooper to teach an intensive, two-day class about Innovation Games, March 30-31, 2009.

When: March 30th-31st, 2009
Where: Cooper, 100 First Street, 26th Floor, San Francisco
Price: $995 per person, $895 per person for two or more attendees
To register: visit the registration site. For group discounts, send email to info@enthiosys.com

I was intrigued by the Enthiosys display at the Agile 2008 conference. Every time I passed by, the booth was filled with folks filling out colorful stickies and pasting them on posters containing grids and trees. Once I overheard a group of people engaged in passionate discussion about the relative benefits of different kinds of sunglasses. I asked what was going on, and learned that this was an Innovation Game called "Buy a Feature."

Because I am somewhat skeptical about feature-collection as a product design mechanism, I asked Rich Mironov to explain this to me. Did he really believe that you could ask people what features should be in a product and use that information with any confidence? Rich explained that you didn't listen just to what people said they wanted, you need to encourage discussion about why those features would be valuable, and how they would be used if they were available. At last, I suspected I'd found an ally in the product management world who understood that you needed to get behind feature requests to the human needs those features serve.

After I read Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, I began to see potential for new ways to engage with my clients in a more fun and collaborative way. Several of the techniques described are similar to the techniques I use in my research: Me and my Shadow, The Apprentice and Show and Tell. Another set seemed to be new ways to collect some of the information I collected through direct research, but in a new way: Start your day, Spider web, Remember the future, Give them a hot tub.

As an experiment in trying new things, and to build better understanding between the Agile Product Management community and the Interaction Design community, Cooper has invited Luke Hohmann to come teach a session of his Innovation Games workshop at Cooper. We hope you can come join us!

Alan Cooper, David Fore, Lane Halley and Tim McCoy were invited by Pivotal Labs to present a tech talk on Agile and User Experience Design on December 10, 2008. Rather than present a prepared presentation, we took questions from the audience and engaged in an hour of interesting conversation about the challenges of integrating User Experience Design and Agile.

The video is available here.

Cooper is a proud co-producer of the User Experience stage at Agile 2009, the annual Agile Alliance conference. We look forward to hearing your stories about how User Experience techniques enhance Agile projects. Visit the User Experience section to learn more, and to submit a proposal. The deadline is March 3rd, 2009.

The conference will be in Chicago, August 24 to 28, 2009. We hope to see you there!

We had a blast at last night's very rockin' IxDA holiday party here in San Francisco, featuring the excellent sounds of My First Earthquake (fronted by ex-Cooperista Rebecca Bortman), Nobody from Ipanema, and The Invisible Cities.

This seems like a good occasion to extend some serious props to Dani Malik and Kim Lenox. They've taken IxDA-SF from its fledgling incarnation as a networking happy hour to what it is today — a vibrant community centered around a series of monthly presentations and discussions that span the diverse perspectives and backgrounds that make up the field of interaction design. Big thanks to Dani, Kim, and the IxDA-SF crew for making this happen.

I ventured out of the office last Friday, to join Bolt Peters and friends for User Research Friday at Mighty in San Francisco. Billed as “Emergent User Research Methods. And Drinks” URF08 was attended by about 150 professionals and students interested in the topic of user research. During his opening remarks, Nate Bolt talked about the benefits of user research, and remarked that “good ideas don’t just come from the guys in the black turtlenecks.” Nate’s comment got me thinking, what are the strengths and frustrations of the user research community, and how can interaction designers get the most benefit from user research techniques?

The userati: Dan Saffer, Indi Young, Cyd Harrell and Nate Bolt

Some attendees at the recent Agile08 conference were put off when it appeared that I was reading my speech rather than delivering it offhand. (If you're interested, you can find my slides and speakers notes here.)

It’s true; I was reading my speech.

When I speak to groups of interaction designers or business people I often address them extemporaneously. It’s a style I enjoy very much and feel that I can do well.

However, the Agile08 audience demanded special treatment. Not only was it large, but it consisted primarily of programmers, agile coaches, and product managers. These professionals are bright, knowledgeable, critical, and opinionated. They do not suffer fools lightly. I was coming to them as something of an outsider; not having programmed for a living for years, and never having programmed in a canonically agile shop.