Thoughts about a Discovery Sprint

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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.

eGovernment Challenges and Information Architecture

Government work provides profound, often deeply frustrating, and generally amazing wide-reaching opportunities to apply our IA/UX powers in the service of millions. But this year’s Information Architecture Summit had no sessions specifically about IA in government settings.

And so I asked... “Shall we lunch?”

Citizen-Centric Portals

I'm working on a citizen-facing, U.S. government portal in the early stages of becoming an exemplar for e-Government services. I did a peer review to identify other sites that also: 1) Steward and present content from across organizations, 2) Require close inter-organizational coordination for user authentication to deliver secure access to applications and data, and 3) Have to pull everyone involved up by the bootstraps to get the job done.