Lean Apart: A Case Study in Agile UX Design for a Distributed Team

Location:

Seacliff A/B

Track:

Time:

Tuesday, 11:45am - 12:35pm

Abstract:

Collaboration between multi-disciplinary, globally distributed teams can be a challenge. Our talk will cover how we brought our team together in both local and remote settings to learn the practice of design studios, making them an integral part of doing UI design. We want to convey the awesome value of sketching with cross-discipline team members, and that includes developers! It shortens the feedback loop drastically, allowing designs to get in front of users faster. This "agile design" works hand in hand with the faster pace of agile development cycles. We’d like to walk you through the design studio method itself, the benefits it can bring to any software development project, and offer guidance on how to run sessions effectively with remote teams. We’ll share what we’ve learned along the way, and show you the benefits it brought to our project.

Adam Archer

Adam is a technical team lead at IBM working on the JazzHub project, a cloud-hosted software development platform. He spent the early portion of his career as a web application developer on the Jazz product line. Through ongoing work with the design organization, he has developed a passion for achieving improved user experience and design outcomes. He believes that there is generally too great a divide between development and design and strives to tighten these gaps by practicing a more collaborative design process.

Jennifer Hayes

Jennifer is a UXD lead at IBM working on the JazzHub project, a cloud-hosted software development platform, as well as Rational Team Concert. Her creative role has her wearing many hats in project work: strategy and planning, driving and overseeing visual design, coordinating design activities, interaction design, user testing and scenario design. What is essential for Jen is bringing the cross-discipline team members into the design process early and often. Close collaboration with developers, product owners, other user experience and design professionals and stakeholders is essential with the end goal of creating "useful, usable and enjoyable" applications and experiences.