Making the Switch To Agile The traditional waterfall model consists of long design, implementation, verification cycles that much be completed before any sort of product could be released. Far too often if you are late to market, you are toast. The frightening truth is that consumers are fickle – quickly losing interest in products that are late to market is just a fact of life that we all must deal with. Source: Wikipedia In order to move away from the waterfall model software companies had to begin working in sprints to accommodate for the release of smaller chunks of shippable code that could be planned, built, tested, and shipped within 15-30 days. The premise of agile is based on a few key concepts and roles that include: • Sprint: A specific time period where a team commits to having a given amount of work completed. • Task/User Story: A definitive amount of work that includes specific outcomes for the designated time period – think of it as a difficulty rating for tasks. Your Turn Related
Metaheuristic Compared to optimization algorithms and iterative methods, metaheuristics do not guarantee that a globally optimal solution can be found on some class of problems. Many metaheuristics implement some form of stochastic optimization, so that the solution found is dependent on the set of random variables generated.[1] By searching over a large set of feasible solutions, metaheuristics can often find good solutions with less computational effort than can algorithms, iterative methods, or simple heuristics. As such, they are useful approaches for optimization problems.[1] Several books and survey papers have been published on the subject.[1][3][4] Properties and classification[edit] Different classifications of metaheuristics. These are properties that characterize most metaheuristics: There are a wide variety of metaheuristics[1] and a number of properties along which to classify them. One approach is to characterize the type of search strategy. Applications[edit] Contributions[edit]
The Gestalt Principles The Gestalt Principles Gestalt is a psychology term which means "unified whole". It refers to theories of visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. These theories attempt to describe how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes when certain principles are applied. These principles are: Similarity Similarity occurs when objects look similar to one another. The example above (containing 11 distinct objects) appears as as single unit because all of the shapes have similarity. Unity occurs because the triangular shapes at the bottom of the eagle symbol look similar to the shapes that form the sunburst. When similarity occurs, an object can be emphasised if it is dissimilar to the others. The figure on the far right becomes a focal point because it is dissimilar to the other shapes. Continuation Continuation occurs when the eye is compelled to move through one object and continue to another object. Closure Examples Proximity Figure and Ground Figure
Guiding Principles for UX Designers Editor's Note: This is a republication of a very popular article Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess) originally wrote on her blog, Pleasure & Pain, back in November. We usually avoid duplicating popular content, but this is such valuable information that we wanted to make sure as many people saw it as possible. Five months ago I wrote a post titled, "So you wanna be a user experience designer," in which I gathered all of the resources in my UX arsenal: publications and blogs, books, local events, organizations, mailing lists, webinars, workshops, conferences, and schooling. My intent was to give aspiring user experience designers, or even those on the hunt for additional inspiration, a launching pad for getting started. The response has been pretty remarkable—the link continues to be sent around the Twitterverse and referenced in the blogosphere. In the post I promised that it would be the beginning of a series, and I'm happy to report that Step 2 is finally here: Guiding Principles. Have empathy
Heuristic Evaluation July 6, 2014 Showing users things they can recognize improves usability over needing to recall items from scratch because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory. January 1, 1997 Discount usability engineering is our only hope. We must evangelize methods simple enough that departments can do their own usability work, fast enough that people will take the time, and cheap enough that it's still worth doing. The methods that can accomplish this are simplified user testing with one or two users per design and heuristic evaluation. June 27, 1995 Participants in a course on usability inspection methods were surveyed 7-8 months after the course. January 1, 1995 Heuristic evaluation is a good method of identifying both major and minor problems with an interface, but the lists of usability problems found by heuristic evaluation will tend to be dominated by minor problems, which is one reason severity ratings form a useful supplement to the method.
Gestalt principles of form perception by Mads Soegaard Gestalt psychology attempts to understand psychological phenomena by viewing them as organised and structured wholes rather than the sum of their constituent parts. Thus, Gestalt psychology dissociates itself from the more 'elementistic'/reductionistic/decompositional approaches to psychology like structuralism (with its tendency to analyse mental processes into elementary sensations) and it accentuates concepts like emergent properties, holism, and context. In the 30s and 40s Gestalt psychology was applied to visual perception, most notably by Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Khler, and Kurt Koffka who founded the so-called gestalt approaches to form perception. Their aim was to investigate the global and holistic processes involved in perceiving structure in the environment (e.g. Law of proximity Figure 1.A: A real-world example of the law of proximity from MTV Music Awards 2002 Law of similarity Law of Prgnanz (figure-ground) Law of symmetry Figure 4.A.: CSC Finland's logo. Law of closure License
Foursquare Solves A Basic UI Problem That Eludes Google Maps And Yelp Last week, Foursquare upgraded Explore, the tool that helps users find recommendations--for coffee shops, bars, and so forth--based on location check-in data. The tab has been around for awhile, but Wednesday’s upgrade did include one novel and significant feature: a proximity-based finder for maps that lets users search for recommendations within an area other than the one they’re at. It works as a simple and tight radius, which can be pinched, zoomed, and dragged about with ease. Put another way, Foursquare has created an elegant solution to the problem of searching not just for things around where you are now, but also the area where you will be. Location search has always been a huge headache, especially for residents of dense urban areas where venues and merchants riddle every block. To take advantage of Explore, Foursquare users must only open up the app’s tab, drag the proximity sensor to the appropriate spot, and search (for, say, "bagels" or "fried chicken").
Heuristic A heuristic technique (/hjʉˈrɪstɨk/; Greek: "Εὑρίσκω", "find" or "discover"), sometimes called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical methodology not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, stereotyping, profiling, or common sense. More precisely, heuristics are strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines.[1] Example[edit] Here are a few other commonly used heuristics, from George Pólya's 1945 book, How to Solve It:[2] Psychology[edit] Well known[edit] Lesser known[edit]
useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design OK and Cancel Buttons: What's the Right Order? Introduction There's some debate among web designers, usability people, and other geeks who think about these kinds of things, about the correct order for "OK" and "Cancel" (or similar) buttons in a web application. There are several precedents that people point to: In the Windows environment, the standard has for many years stated that when the buttons are placed at the bottom of a modal window, they should be grouped together with "OK" on the left and "Cancel" on the right. So what's a web designer who has a need for "OK" and "Cancel" functions to do? OK function: This causes a pending action to be executed, such as saving some changes or submitting an order. After some questions about the most appropriate order for these buttons on a web application came up on a usability-related email distribution list, I decided to conduct an online survey of usability and user experience professionals to see what order they think is best. The Survey The survey was built using SurveyMonkey. Results
Heuristics