Macadamian Blog

Eliminating Barriers to Adoption for Mobile Applications

Discoverability and availability are crucial when a customer decides what mobile product or product line he is going to adopt.

User-Centered Agile Software Development

I just finished reading User-Centered Agile Methods. It is a short and well written book that attempts to paint an accurate picture of how user experience design can fit in with current Agile development processes.

It has a whole bunch of useful nuggets of information (for both UXers and developers). However, the most useful piece to me is the really cogent description of Sprint 0 (Inception sprint, Phase 0).

Sprint 0 is one of the most debated aspects of integrating UX into the Agile development cycle. Many Agile experts state that Sprint 0 is a violation of the basic principles of Agile. While others say that it is just silly to start a project without a bit of planning and architecture.

iPhone vs Android vs Windows Phone 7

A few weeks ago, we started an experiment we are chronicling in a blog called The Mobile Experience. We set out to create an application across three different mobile platforms, to really get a sense for how difficult it is to create a mobile app across three different platforms at the same time. It's something that many of our customers are dealing with as they start to extend their products into mobile. Which platforms do I concentrate on? Which are the most time consuming to develop on? How are the UI paradigms and standards different?

Every week or so we'll be summarizing some of our findings in our main blog. This week I'll focus on some of our early feedback about what it's like to develop on each one of these platforms - which has the most complete toolkits, and what's it like to ramp up a development team on each platform?

Just lead it

Oh Nevermind! I will just do it myself. It will be much easier, you think to yourself. 

How many times have we said this to ourselves, or worse, to someone on our team? How many times have we thought it would be less stressful to just do the task/project ourselves instead of trying to explain the problem to someone else?

Now be honest.

Often? Yeah, me too.

This is a common anti-pattern, especially in the global context when explaining a task with little overlap in time zones. This is where it feels like it will take more time and energy to explain the task then to actually do it yourself. You rationalize this in the name of efficiency. You are being more efficient. Efficiency is good.

Don't fall for this trap! It is an anti-pattern. You cannot be more efficient then a high calibre, well motivated team.

This anti-pattern will have a negative effect on your team's morale as they will see you as a micro-manager. Or worse, they will perceive that you don't trust their abilities. Furthermore, if you don’t take the time to mentor your team members, or provide new and interesting tasks for them to improve their skills on, they will never get better at their jobs, and their morale will suffer. The team will never improve and you will be stuck in a rut.

As a manager your job is to ensure the task is completed as efficiently as possible. Your job as a leader is to look out for their well being, and do what you can to inspire them. A simple rule is to try very hard not do things that will affect your employee's morale; a well motivated and happy employee is a productive employee. A productive employee is an efficient employee. Efficiency is good.

Another part of this anti-pattern is that if you are heads down implementing features, who is leading and managing? Who is looking out past today, or maybe this week? Who is reporting status to the customers, identifying potential risks, building relationships with the customer, or even looking out for the next opportunity? No one is, since you are now focused on the tactical instead of the strategic.

You are creating “project debt” by “doing” instead of leading. Sure it might feel good to make progress on your project, to contribute to the critical path. Maybe get it out the door sooner, perform some technical kungfu. However, you are incurring a lot of “project debt” to do this. At some point “project debt” comes due, and it might be paid for with a missed opportunity, or an unhappy customer due to a mismanaged relationship.

So we recognize that this is an anti-pattern, how do we assign and explain tasks efficiently?

1. In a push task management model, assign tasks several days in advance, and instill a mindset that the team reviews their tasks as soon as they are assigned, even if they don’t plan on starting the task right away. This will allow the team to look at their tasks and seek clarification or answers ahead of time, before they are actually trying to perform the task. Sometimes their questions will flush out missing requirements that might need to be thought about with the customer or product owner as well.

2. The same thing applies in a pull task management model, encourage your team to pull the tasks ahead of time, so they can ask any questions they may have before they are blocked for a day waiting for you to answer their questions, or in some cases, wake up.

3. Explain the tasks in person, or over video/voice. Follow up with a written explanation. Email works, but a wiki is better. There will be more transparency to the rest of the team, and it will be easy to keep the wiki up to date when things change. We all know things will change right

4. After you explained the task in person, ask questions to make sure they understand, especially around requirements and any time sensitive pieces.

5. In some projects, we use a concept of a “design patch”, in it the developer explains their development approach, basically how they will implement the feature, and how long they think it will take. This isn’t to micro-manage, but often will highlight any lack of understanding. It also has the benefit of improving the teams planning skills and ability to do top down design.

Those are five quick ideas I have, how do you delegate tasks?

Who wags who?

It's an old joke to ask if the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog. The saying fits in many contexts outside of media, including the age old battle between testing and engineering, or the usability of the application, and the technical design of the application. Do the user experience (UX) folks design without regards to the technical feasibility of their work, or does the engineering team dictate design by imposing technical constraints?

Jumping in the way back machine, five or six years ago I was working on a large web application, it was Macadamian's first project where the engineering team implemented the output of an interaction designer. When asked, I told the designer to go ahead, don't let technology limit your designs. Sure enough, we ended up creating an impressive web application (see left) with all the bells and whistles of a rich internet application, all back in 2003. I also lived at work for weeks implementing all that cool stuff. I wish I had read this article back then!

At Macadamian, we have had a world class user experience group in-house for the past few years. Learning to work with this new UX group was not an easy task for a primarily engineering and quality assurance company. It took more then a couple of months to work out the process for collaboration between UX and engineering. Everything Tim has discussed we have also learned, the hard way.

Being that I come from the engineering side of Macadamian, and that most of the costs of the project are on the engineering side of the project, the point that jumped out at me the most was the suggestion to listen to the concerns of the developers.

The first few combined projects between the engineering and UX group resulted in significant schedule delays and cost overruns on the engineering side due to really good, really cutting edge, and extremely difficult to implement designs coming out the UX group. When the estimates were created, the estimator put time in to basically add some form fields, text, and maybe a graphic or two. Pretty naive.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), the customer saw these designs, loved them, and then expected to get them for the same price as that form with 23 checkboxes and 97 form fields. The complexity and innovation required on the UX side was not expected on the fixed-bid engineering side.

To solve this problem, a simple (and in hindsight, obvious) process improvement was made. The developers had a chance to look over the designs prior to the customer seeing them. This allowed any potential design decisions that would adversely impact the schedule and cost to be caught, and fully discussed prior to the designs being approved by the customer. It wasn't that engineering had a veto over the design, it was allowing the usability group to be made aware of any potential technology challenges to be discussed earlier in the cycle.

This allowed the two groups to work closely together and solve any potential issues. Sometimes the UX folks were able to convince the developers of the critical nature of the particular design, and other times the user experience group came up with another solution that was just as usable, but much easier to implement. However, don't confuse this approach with one where technology drives what personas can and cannot do with the product, that would be a mistake. User needs have to drive the design.