RE: Improving the user experience incrementally?

Questions like this need to be carefully examined.  I read the word
'incremental' but the conversation sounds more like iterative questions.  I
know picky, picky, picky.  But these two words follow significantly
different paths in Agile workframes.   Incremental is working on chinks of a
large well defined and measurably verifiable delivery.  If you do not have
all of these items then it might be advisable to first decide what the gap
is from what you have to work with and this ideal.  At the other end of the
spectrum is iterative.  Iterative work contains more exploration,
experimentation, and research and therefore values the lessons learned
through failure as much if not more than success.  In fact success may be
viewed as a lucky accident by those who are valuing the learning more than
the creation of something.

 

So to answer the measure question you need to make sure what you have to
work with and how you are going to do it aligns with your measures.  Poorly
defined, vague and inexact goals are best served by iterative work while
highly defined, quantitatively measurable work is best measured through
incremental.   The secret to the sauce is the mixing of the two and the
secret to success is making it clear what you are doing and how you are
doing it.  You might find a blog on this interesting.

http://www.bigvisible.com/mdwyer/incremental-or-iterative-an-agile-fork-in-t
he-road/

\

 

Mike Dwyer
Principal, Agile Coach

BigVisible Solutions
url:    http://www.bigvisible.com <http://www.bigvisible.com/>

cell:   (978) 376-4422

email: mdwyer@... <mailto:asingh@...>

 

 

From: leina elgohari [mailto:leina_elgohari@...]
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2009 9:04 AM
To: agile-usability@...
Subject: Re: [agile-usability] Improving the user experience incrementally?

 


Hello William

 

Thanks. A very nice topic to start off with.

 

I have another burning question:

How do you measure each incremental improvement? Is it possible to do that?

 

Many Thanks

Lee



--- On Sat, 2/14/09, William Pietri <william@...> wrote:


From: William Pietri <william@...>
Subject: [agile-usability] Improving the user experience incrementally?
To: agile-usability@...
Date: Saturday, February 14, 2009, 11:06 PM


Hi, folks. Every day, people sign up for this group, often mentioning
things that they are hoping to learn more about. But few of them ask
directly. That's only natural, but it leaves me suspecting that a lot of
people aren't getting all they want out of this group.

To see if we can change that, I'm going to start going back through
subscription requests, starting discussions around common themes.
Novices, consider this an invitation to speak up with specific
questions. Everybody else, please chime in, especially if you feel
you've got experience or advice that would help those new to the topic.

First up: In theory, agile processes, with their frequent releases and
even-more-frequent iterations, provide a lot of opportunity to
continuously improve the user experience. When is that promise
fulfilled? How can designers best take advantage of that? And when
things fall short, what steps have people taken to remedy that?

Curiously,

William