Thoughts about a Discovery Sprint

-->

At a recent federal/industry roundtable discussion, Greg Godbout, former director of 18F Consulting, suggested that user experience can be incorporated into agile development through the use of something called a Discovery Sprint. GSA's boutique agile shop provides this service as one of the short-term offerings on its menu. Now called a Design Sprint, following Google Venture's model, its purpose is "…to assess your team's or organization's readiness, understand your customers and their needs, brainstorm ideas, and provide guiding principles and recommendations to move forward."

This advice reflects an understanding that, for all its strengths, one of agile’s downsides is that it’s not a user centered method. Agile scrum is optimized for rapid development and release of working code. It’s not optimized to make products that will get adopted by end users.

Design Doing: Creating a Digital Practice

The environment matters

The environment we work in matters.  It gives us agency – the ability to affect things with our actions. As user experience professionals, it’s important for us to think about transforming the business – our environment – so Design Doing can happen.

Listen to the podcast at http://library.iasummit.org/podcasts/design-doing-creating-a-digital-practice/ 

The Dubious Waves of Error

From the customer’s point of view, an error message is a crisis.  When you’re hit by an error on a website, you’re in trouble – by definition.   To make things worse, the message can be so cryptic it stops you dead.  A  poorly-designed error message drives you to a competitor’s site, on the phone with the call center, back to paper-based processes, or just giving up.

Don’t let this happen to your users!  It’ll take work, but make the effort to establish consistent and effective messages and standards for your websites.  The end result should be simple; the error message tells your visitors what went wrong, helps them over any barriers, and lets them get on with their business.