UXImmersion 2012
I attended UXImmersion here in Portland last Tuesday and I was struck by Jeff Gothelf’s presentation about Lean UX. This was recorded for UXImmersion OnDemand, so I recommend watching it.
We’ve been reading and thinking about where UX fits into Agile development, and Lean UX in particular. I was struck by two things that Jeff said. First, Lean UX is about rapid iteration, user testing and hypothesis validation (which it has in common with Agile). A second tenant of Lean UX is shared understanding, particularly between UXers and developers. But I think that really applies to everyone involved—from high-level stakeholders all the way down the line.
ProtoShare is a great way to do both of these things. Starting low-fi, moving to high-fi, working through many iterations, sharing early and often, and using real HTML, CSS and JavaScript that your users can experience. But where ProtoShare really shines is with shared understanding, which I think is the harder of these two principles to accomplish in practice.
What I love about ProtoShare is that it provides a continuous stream of communication between high-level stakeholders, user experience professionals, designers, developers and end users. And it does this whether you’re in the same room or on different continents. Our most successful customers call ProtoShare the “brain” or the “bible” of their projects because it provides this shared understanding across normally uncoordinated groups.
Jeff showed a huge workspace covered floor-to-ceiling with whiteboards for communication. This got me thinking of ProtoShare as that whiteboard—flexible, centralized location, a sort of project clearing house—that you can use for dispersed teams. If you get your team in ProtoShare, you can get your work done, and ProtoShare handles the documentation. You don’t just get a sketch or a prototype, you get the discussions, thinking and decisions behind it.
At any rate, I’m excited about Lean UX. User Experience matters. It’s about time our development processes start to embody that.
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