The UX Graffiti Wall
The UX Graffiti Wall, a persistent physical public display, aims to capture feedback and ideas on core issues that user experience practitioners confront in an AGILE development environment. Conference attendee contributions may be based on personal experiences or discussion surrounding session and tutorial topics.
Figure 1. — from peterjfroessler - (?) Conceptual Sketch of UX Graffiti Wall
Feedback may take on a variety of expressive forms, examples of which will be provided on the display. Attendees walking by the UX Graffiti Wall have the freedom to document their responses to issues in any form that allows them to most effectively communicate their ideas (i.e. sketches, visualizations, bulleted lists, explanations, etc.). This particular format, to the best of our knowledge, has yet to be explored in a conference setting. Yet, current literature supports this more open-ended methodological approach that we are proposing [1,2] as well as the use of mixed media and visualization techniques (Figure 1.) as an alternative form of expression and documentation [3,4].
Figure 2. — from uswim - (?) Use of graphical visualization techniques at the 2008 San Francisco VizThink conference
Figure 3. Idea Map captured by a sketch artist at the TED 2008 conference
We plan to use a broadly-defined collection of key issues regarding user experience practices in an AGILE context as a starting point for the collection of creative solutions, approaches, experiences, and best practices. We feel the AGILE 2008 conference will provide a unique forum for opening up the conversation across all roles that play a part in AGILE development. Additionally, obtaining feedback in the same venue as the many papers, talks, and workshops may help to provide points of reference unavailable to the community back on their home turf.
Preliminary results will be shared during the scheduled session time. We also expect to synthesize, package, and share a comprehensive set of results in the long-term using a similar publicly-accessible medium. The resulting repository of topics, comments, and ideas from the AGILE community this year will hopefully help fuel future discussions and help us to better understand the challenges of incorporating User Experience efforts into an AGILE environment.
[1] Hilliges, O., et al. (2007). Designing for collaborative creative problem solving. Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition, 137 – 146.
[2] Gerber, E. (2007). Improvisation principles and techniques for design. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 1069 – 1072.
[4] http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/ted2008_autodesk_bigviz_\book_2008_03_14.pdf
The exhibit will persist across the entire five conference days. We plan to share responsibility for managing and moderating the exhibit with several other attendees from Salesforce.com User Experience as well as other interested parties. Materials needed for participation will be provided at the Wall on supply tables. A large instruction poster will provide direction and seed content will show participants the various forms their contributions can take (storyboards, cartoons, process maps, definitions, etc).
The four colors for the sticky notes provided will represent roles participants play in their AGILE teams (i.e. developer, user experience practitioner, product manager, scrum master). The three colors of color-coding labels available are intended to mark the feedback as a question, general comment, or solution/suggestion/idea. Moderators will be tasked with either assisting participants with this coding system or coding contributions once they have been added. All contributions will be clustered and coded at the end of each day. Pictures or video of the UX Graffiti Wall will also be taken as it evolves and grows.
Working space will be provided with additional foam boards for emerging topics as well as an idea ‘parking lot’ for attendee contributions that may be difficult to fit into the provided framework.
In addition to requesting seed content in the form of Polaroid® photos and comments, we would also like to ask presenters of each user experience session or workshop to encourage their audience to build on the photos and comments they will post. We plan to discuss mechanics ahead of time with each session or workshop leader so it is clear what should be announced at each session to increase participation, and what should be documented by them (photos, quotes, etc.).