4 Strategies for Working With Designers Without Killing Each Other Fourteen years ago, in my first job where my title was “Information Architect,” I clashed with a designer. We were working at a large advertising agency that was known for stunning design work. The art directors wielded a level of power at the agency that I have never seen anywhere else, and the result over the decades was a portfolio of gorgeous print and TV ads. The design-first method had worked well for this agency, winning them awards and a long roster of Fortune 500 clients, so they naturally decided to use this approach in their newly launched web department, too. Things went well for a while, until I attended a kickoff meeting for a new website project. The designer came to the meeting with an already completed graphic design, before any information had been provided about who the site was for or what it would do. What followed was a long, drawn-out battle for control of the site between me and the designer. Me: And when you click on this button where does it take you? 1. 2. 3.
Scrum Sprint Planning Meeting Posted by admin under Scrum Basics Sprint Planning Meeting In Scrum, every iteration begins with the sprint planning meeting. At this meeting, the Product Owner and the team negotiate which stories a team will tackle that sprint. When the team agrees to tackle the work, the Product Owner adds the corresponding stories into the sprint backlog. At this point, the Product Owner is typically asked to leave while the team decomposes the sprint backlog items into tasks. Now that sprint goals are defined, the team is ready to get to work. Watch an example Sprint Planning Meeting. The Daily Standup The heart of the Scrum process is the daily standup meeting, also known as the daily Scrum. What have I done since the last Scrum meeting (yesterday)? This meeting should not exceed 15 minutes. When the daily Scrum meeting is held is for the team and Product Owner to decide, but most Scrum literature encourages teams to hold the meeting as soon as all the team members arrive in the morning.
Tissue Flowers A couple of months ago, Jenny - the very lovely editor of PaperCraft Inspirations - asked me to work up a feature on different ways to use tissue paper. You can see the results in the September issue (on sale right about now), and alongside ruffles, twists, layers, buttons and twirly skirts, there's a miniature version of an old tissue-paper favourite. I made these flowers for Halloween a couple of years ago, and although the large scale can look fantastic on card projects, it doesn't leave room for very much else. Tissue paper (plain or patterned) Scissors Ruler Pencil Thin wire (e.g. fuse or jewellery wire) Small button or circle of card PVA glue Measure and cut out two strips of tissue paper, each around 20cm long and 5-6cm wide. Cut a small piece of jewellery wire and wrap around the centre of your folded tissue. To create a spiky, dahlia-style flower, snip each end of the tissue strip into a triangular point, or, for a softer look, cut into a curve. x
Is There Any Meat on This Lean UX Thing? By Jared M. Spool Originally published: Nov 30, 2011 Out of nowhere, Lean UX is now a hot topic for UX professionals, generating the complete range of responses, from complete buy-in to calling it complete bulls**t. I was very curious about all this, so I set out to learn what Lean UX was all about. My conclusion: There really is something here. Step Into the Wayback Machine, Sherman To get a solid handle on why I think Lean UX is now important, we have to go way back into the past—to the 1960s and 1970s. However, as people found new uses, the size of the software projects grew. To keep everything under control, the field of software engineering started to emerge and one of its biggest contributions at that time was a management technique known as the Software Development Life Cycle. For these initial mainframe applications, the SDLC brought a ton of order to what otherwise was a lot of chaos. However, it didn't take end-user needs into account and, frankly, it didn't need to.
20 Free Productivity Booster Apps for Mac Lacking of productivity applications will slow down our workflow and consume more time, even though we’ve already purchased a Mac. Using only built-in Mac applications, we can neither get the most out of our Mac nor boost our productivity. In this article, we’ve compiled several free applications for Mac OS X (including application launcher, easy note-taker application, data backup tool, data sharing utility, etc) that can significantly boost your productivity. Let us know which one is your favorite! Quicksilver Quicksilver is a super fast application launcher empowered with many time-saving actions. width="550" height="270" alt="Quicksilver Screenshot" class="bdr-gray" /> Think Think is a light application that lets you fully focus on your work. width="550" height="344" alt="Think Screenshot" class="bdr-gray" /> Cashbox Cashbox is a personal finance application for Mac OS X designed to make managing your personal finances a breeze. Anxiety Sidenote Growl SketchBox Name Mangler Appointments FreeMind
Common Mistakes when Applying Scrum | How to Create Products that Customers Hate 5 Flares Filament.io 5 Flares × The following list is a tongue-in-cheek collection of common mistakes in applying Scrum. They all influence product success negatively. Apply the product owner role pragmatically: Spilt the role across several people or work with a product owner committee.Shoot for the maximum marketable product – a product that pleases everyone and has a myriad of features.Have a can-do attitude, say yes to every requirement, and put it into the product backlog. To avoid the mistakes above and to learn how to create great products with Scrum, refer to my book Agile Product Management with Scrum, or book yourself on one of my product owner trainings.
Why Pinterest Is So Addictive I would have written this article sooner, but I was busy on Pinterest. If you are still among the uninitiated, the social platform for collecting, sharing, and commenting on of photos of personal passions is uniquely engaging, absorbing, and addictive. The human instinct to collect things--be it baseball cards, miniature spoons, or teacups--is as old as stuff itself. But why would Pinterest, which has been around since 2008, be attracting such swarms of devotees now? Finding Your Happy Place and Sharing Your Ideal Self Dr. Long believes that Pinterest, like Facebook, relies on people generating content that interests other users, so once a critical mass of people comment and re-pin, it reinforces others to generate content. It’s more than just a critical mass of users, though, that’s driving Pinterest’s growth, says Long. In contrast to Facebook, Long believes Pinterest is a refuge from relationship status, check-ins at restaurants, or pictures of kids. Perfecting the Art of Collecting
How to Get the Team Behind Your Product Idea by ZURB You have an idea for an awesome product, but your team isn't bought in. You need them behind you or else your idea will die a quick death. How do you turn the tide in your favor? Over the years, we've had this very problem and learned some hard lessons from it. Get Early Feedback, Build Momentum Soliciting feedback as early as possible gets buy-in from the team, building momentum for your ideas. Take for instance the early stages of developing Verify. Bryan, however, wasn't just soliciting the team's feedback on Verify. Build A Crude Prototype, Show Value Quickly One way to showcase value in an idea is to build a crude prototype. Sure, we've all heard the story of Art Fry's "Aha moment" when he struck on the idea of marrying Spencer Silver's "weak adhesive" concept to a bookmark when his own mark fell out of a hymnbook. See no one really saw the use for the stick note. When management ran out, they asked for more. Cultivate Advocates
User experience is strategy, not design : peterme.com User experience, when addressed appropriately, is an holistic endeavor. The emerging conversation of “cross-channel user experience” is redundant, because if you’re weren’t thinking cross-channel (and cross-platform, cross-device, etc. etc.), you were doing “user experience” wrong. As the holism of user experience becomes more broadly realized, something else becomes clear. It’s only once we recognize UX as “an integrative philosophy of management for continuously improving the quality of products and processes” (to borrow Wikipedia’s definition of Total Quality Management) that we appreciate it’s truly massive scale, and how limiting it is for UX to be solely associated with specific (and usually screen-based) design practices. The practice of user experience is most successful when focused on strategy, vision, and planning, not design and execution.
Scrum Effort Estimation and Story Points Posted by admin under Scrum Basics In waterfall, managers determine a team member’s workload capacity in terms of time. That is, managers estimate how long they anticipate certain tasks will take and then assign work based on that team member’s total available time. This is problematic because it does not distinguish between a story that is very hard to complete and one that is undemanding; it only considers how long the work will take. To put it another way, coding a feature and organizing the heaps of documentation on your desk are activities that likely take the same amount of time, but there’s no question that the former would require much more sustained concentration and effort. Because of that fact, they should be recognized as incredibly different tasks, requiring different levels of effort. Scrum takes a considerably different approach to determining a team member’s capacity. What does the process of estimation look like? Need an example? Be Sociable, Share!
Bean: An OS X Word Processor (Build 20100115144158) Download Bean for High Sierra or Mojave Version 3.2.13 (released 3 May 2019) for macOS High Sierra (10.13) or macOS Mojave (10.14) • Not compatible with earlier macOS versions • Includes several bug fixes. Download Bean for Sierra Version 3.2.9 (released 14 November 2016) for macOS Sierra 10.12 • New in this version: even more bug fixes for Sierra • Spanish localization (Thank you, Francisco Ramón Román) Download Bean Version 3.2.5 (released 8 March 2013) OS X 10.5 to OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), Intel only Localized for: Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Slovak Changelog / News & Plans / Previous Versions Requirements / Installation Bean requires a Mac with an Intel processor, running at least OS X 10.5 Leopard or greater. To install, double-click the downloaded file Bean-Install.zip. FAQ / Troubleshooting Answers to common questions about Bean are here. Cost / License / Sourcecode / Warranty Bean is provided at no monetary cost. Bean 3.x is closed source.
Fucking Ship It Already: Limited Products vs Shitty Products In our second installment of Fucking Ship It Already, we deal with a common problem for startups: shitty products. Look, I know that building a product with one or two engineers and no money is tough. As an entrepreneur, you almost certainly have far more ideas than you have resources to create those ideas. And it doesn’t help that you have people like me screaming, “Ship it! Who could possibly blame you for shipping a product that is, frankly, kind of shitty? I could. Let’s take a step back and try to understand the difference between a shitty product and a limited product. One big difference is that I wholly endorse shipping a limited version of your product. A limited product is something that may not do much, but what it does, it does well. It is not half a big product. Most importantly, a limited product is just big enough and good enough that you can learn something important from it. But a limited product probably doesn’t do anything else. And they did it really well.
T & F Online Three studies were conducted to ascertain how quickly people form an opinion about web page visual appeal. In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web homepages presented for 500 ms each. The second study replicated the first, but participants also rated each web page on seven specific design dimensions. Visual appeal was found to be closely related to most of these. Related articles View all related articles How Companies Track People Without Becoming Big Brother Andre Lavoie is the CEO of ClearCompany, the first talent alignment platform that bridges the gap between talent management and business strategy by contextualizing employees’ work around a company’s vision and goals. Privacy is a huge buzzword in today’s digitally-connected world. Companies are trying to strike a balance between transparent organizational structures that encourage collaboration and innovation, and respecting the privacy and boundaries of workers. These companies are walking a tightrope, and they’re often falling down. What happens is usually far from organizational transparency and closer to micromanagement. According to the book “What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do” by Laura Stack, some 75 to 80 percent of the American workforce has suffered at the hands of micromanagement. In fact, a study by Dale Carnegie showed 42 percent of the most engaged workers felt their talents were being utilized and recognized, not micromanaged. See progress without micromanaging