The “Just Do It” (with users) methodology!

Stephen Collins has written an interesting commentary on iterative IT project methodologies with an interesting and heated discussion following.

In my experience, the approach Stephen talks about has a lot of advantages over traditional methods of handing systems design and development. While traditional approaches can lack innovation and be slow to progress change, an iterative approach can reduce risk by being more responsive to change and result in quicker time to launch. Dominic Campbell even suggests that the eternal beta should be embraced, iterating and improving system design once released to users.

I was recently involved in a project where we used an iterative design and analysis phase. It certainly worked better than some of the slower-moving approaches I’ve been involved with before — it freed the team to try new things and new approaches to difficult problems see if they worked. If they worked, then they were handed over to the developers. If they didn’t work, they were discarded with minimal time lost.

Of importance throughout this process, though, was a user-centred design methodology. So as to not overwhelm users, we only exposed them to things that were improvements to what they had seen earlier, or things that would directly affect them and their work. We showed them storyboards and prototypes (both wireframes and high-fidelity HTML mockups) and involved them in helping to improve the concepts. This was great for change management as it helped to set expectations about what they were getting and how it would look and feel. It also meant, given they were involved in design, they had greater ownership of the final product. And once they were happy with what ever iteration we had collectively come up with (in this design phase and not in production), we then folded it into the development cycle.

Ultimately, this meant that we could really only move as fast as users could consume new information. The result, though, was a final product was tailored to their wants and needs and not the whims of developers who want to try out something new on an ignorant public.

M