Scrum, an Agile project management methodology

Today I attended a 2 hour session on Scrum. Apparently the concept of Scrum is derived from the sport Rugby. The concept is that you have a team of people working together to achieve a common goal in small iterations. The scrum process consists of periods of development known as ‘sprints’, and are moderated by people called ScrumMasters. Yes, it all sounds strange, but the concept is that if you design something iteratively, that you can change development direction as needed and determined by the Product Owner.

I was partially exposed to an Agile development methodology working from a remote location, and it seemed rather chaotic. Hopefully this will run smoother since most of the people involved are in one location. One of the most important elements to Scrum are daily stand-up meetings. These are 15 minute long meetings to monitor progress on a day to day basis.

Tomorrow I will be giving a presentation on Interaction Design integration into the Scrum process. This integration may prove to be a challenge for me as I am the only HF/UX Designer at this facility, and there may be several Scrum projects going on concurrently. I will need to determine when and how I will be involved in each of the projects. I’m sure that my role will evolve throughout time. I am interested to see how this all pans out.  For more detailed information on scrum, you can check it out on wikipedia here.

Cascading style sheets

So the whole content management part didn’t end up working for my site that I’ve been working on, but I did learn how to make a website using more than 1 cascading style sheet to alternate looks. Because of the variety of ages of my target users for my website, I wanted to provide text large enough for older users, but I didn’t want to design the entire site that way. I wanted to allow the user to easily change the font size of the text on the page for easier readability.

I tried a few techniques before I found one that I settled on. I was very surprised when I researched the subject matter how many people were of the very strict opinion that text size should only be modified through the browser. This does not seem like a very good solution for people who either do not have a mouse with a scroll button (ie, using the ctrl-scroll method of changing font size) or for people who are not very computer savvy. I have witnessed first-hand geriatric computer users who can barely operate a computer mouse at all.

But I digress. I found an excellent article on switching out style sheets for websites to create different looks. This of course could be used for changing font sizes, and I found the solution to be EXTREMELY easy to implement. I have to admit, I was a bit intimidated at first, but after the encouragement of one of my fellow web developers I successfully pulled it off. Here is the article I used to do this technique.
Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets by Paul Sowden

Free Online Content Mangement (CMS) Applications

I recently volunteered to do a small web project for a non-profit organization. I used several of my user centered design techniques, and it really does seem like using this process almost makes the site self designing. Although this will sound contradictory, i didn’t do customer interviews because the project was supposed to be a surprise and I didn’t want them to know I was working on it. Instead I imagined I did the interviews, and I created personas based on this experience. That process in itself became rather inspirational, and I promise in the future I will not cut corners like that.

Anyway, back to my original topic. I realized that once I designed the website, I wanted to be able to “hand it off” to the non-profit webmaster. Now had this organization had a fantastic website, i would probably have not been so compelled to redesign it. My dilemma was how to make the site easy to maintain once i was finished with it.

My original idea was to create a framework using ASP includes, so they would not be able to mess up the header or navigation. I brought this subject up to a peer this weekend, and he suggested that I check out Joomla. He said he uses it all the time, and it was very easy to use. I remembered seeing Joomla available from my hosting service, and I called customer service to find out that I could not use it because I use ASP hosting instead of Linux. So they recommended I check out DotNetNuke instead. After about 3-4 hours and 3 calls to customer service I finally got Dotnetnuke set up on one of my URL’s.

The application seemed relatively easy to use, and offered lots of functionality, but unfortunately the website I designed used lots of complex cascading Javascript Navigation. I ended up not using DotNetNuke for this particular project, and I will be going back to my original plan. I am glad I messed around with this application because I think that it could be very useful for making simple websites. There are also a whole array of free skins available for these type of websites.

Writing Personas

Part of my responsibility as a Human Factors engineer is to write user personas. A personas is a fictitious character that embodies many of the characteristics of many users into one user. The persona is generated from customer data collected during interviews in the User-Centered Design process. A persona is only effective when it can be used to help solve design decisions when designing a product.

I was having a hard time writing personas because I had not generated any user interviews. However my coworker provided me the customer data I needed to get started. Having information to base the character off of made the persona creation much easier. It required quite a bit of creativity to be able to give details to the customer face, but once I got started, I enjoyed the process.

Today I sent out 4 personas to be critiqued by people who are in the same role as those I wrote about. Some of the elements that I used to give the personas their character was a handwritten quote at the top of the page written in the person’s own handwriting. I also included a photo, the character’s story or narrative some profile characteristics, and daily task lists. I am hoping that when I present the personas to the developers who will be using them, it will help give them insight to the needs of the people we are designing the software for.

Coxsackie Virus Sux

When I originally started this blog, my intent was to be able to keep a professional journal, but every once in a while when you get your personal world gets rocked, it becomes very hard to keep focused on UX only, so I am dedicating this blog post to what happened to me and my family this past week.

My son (William) and myself picked up a nasty virus the week before last. William started showing signs of sickness on Tuesday (6/24) evening, but he seemed ok the next day, so I assumed he was just uncomfortable from teething. When I picked him up from daycare on Wednesday, I was told he was sick. So I took him to the doctor promptly Thursday morning. The doctor said he had the Coxsackie Virus, and that there was no treatment, and that he would have to just let the virus run it’s course. I also noticed on Friday (6/27) that I was starting to display show the same symptoms. I was kind of bummed out because my husband and I were going to throw a 4th of July/birthday party for me on Friday (7/4/08).

William and me at the emergency room of the hospital

I took off work on Thursday & Friday (6/26-27) to take care of myself and William. We both got plenty of bed rest. On Saturday, Williams grandmother came to help take care of him. When he woke from his afternoon nap, we noticed he was beginning to limp. We could not figure out why he was limping, but on Sunday the limp became pronounced enough for us to become concerned. So we took him to the emergency room to get checked out. The doctor x-rayed his legs, and did an ultrasound on his hip, and could not find anything wrong. His blood tests did show signs of inflammation. He told us to keep an eye on William and to bring him to the doctor later in the week.

Monday I let William rest at home and his condition did not get better by Tuesday. My husband and I took William back to the pediatrician on Tuesday, and he was concerned about his leg, and recommended an Orthopedic specialist. My husband took William to the Orthopedic specialist, and I came into work. We assumed he would just check things out. Shortly after I arrived at work, I got a text message that William’s knee was infected, and that he needed immediate surgery. The doctor was concerned that the infection could have damaged cartilage in his knee that could cause permanent damage. Of course I was mortified. I excused myself from the office and went directly to the hospital where William had been admitted for surgery.

William and me after his surgery.

William was at the hospital for 5 days after his operation. They wanted to keep him under observation to make sure that the infection did not return to his leg. I was rather surprised at the lack of response by our friends during the time we were in the hospital. I was glad that my son was okay, and that even though we were in the hospital for the 4th of July we managed to get discharged from the hospital in time for my birthday on the 6th.

William is at home and recuperating. Hopefully he will have a full recovery in no time. We are all looking forward to our lives returning to normal. And now back to our regularly programmed material…