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User Interface Design Studio

Mon, 2008-02-25 15:59 — Jeff White, Jim Ungar
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room: Dufferin, 2 — time: Wednesday 14:00-15:30, Wednesday 16:00-17:30
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User experience designers – struggling with how to share the role of designer with engineers and other members of your agile teams? Trying to find a better way to communicate the findings of your user-centered research and establish the importance design plays in any software product? Wondering how to get your design ahead of development so you can have time for usability testing and iterative design? We’ve got the answer for you – design studio.

Design studio, as you’ll practice it in this tutorial, is a time boxed, collaborative design session that serves to consolidate ideas and team direction around a common design.

Join Jim Ungar and Jeff White for a fun, fast paced 180 minute interface design studio tutorial. You’ll learn two core lessons: 1) how to plan and conduct a design studio with your agile teams, and 2) the many benefits studio approach to design delivers for user experience designers and agile software development teams.

Process/Mechanics

  1. Introduction and explanation of studio approach to design, and how it builds the skills of any designer. Slides presented to participants by Jim and Jeff.
    10 minutes

  2. The actual studio – participants create many different conceptual sketches to solve a design problem we’ll present.
    2a. 11x17 paper, pencils, and colored sharpies are provided to the participants.
    25 minutes

  3. Next, they come together as a team to present their designs.
    3a. Each designer tapes their sketches on the wall, and presents them one at a time.
    60 minutes

  4. The team critiques each design. The critique involves the team discussing the pros and cons of the design, and asking the designer questions.
    4a. The feedback is recorded on giant post it notes taped on the wall right next to each concept sketch.
    40 minutes

  5. The team makes decisions and trade offs and finally decides upon one final concept with which to ‘move forward’. This final concept is a manifestation of the good parts of the many concepts presented during the studio. Depending on the number of participants, the critique and design session will be done as one large group or split up into multiple teams.
    25 minutes

  6. Explanation of the many benefits the design studio brings to agile teams, and to the user experience of the product they are building. Slides presented to participants.
    10 minutes

  7. Questions and general discussion.
    10 minutes