UPA Audience goes straight for the Learning Point - how to work with Project Management Techniques

The UPA event "Usability practitioners, designers and technologists - working effectively together" was an interesting lesson in how the industry has developed recently. As the organisers said, designers and developers have different objectives, culture, language and approaches. Ensuring the usability message gets heard means understanding team members' needs and communicating accordingly.

Heather McQuaid and John O'Reilly of Conchango, and Alasdair Scott of Filter were the representatives from the three areas under review: usability, project management and design, respectively.

Scott began proceedings by showing that a designer can speak the language of UCD. He attacked his own industry, and especially the student members (and maybe their tutors), for aspiring to great design, not usability. 'Designer visibility is perceived as good,' he said, shaking his head and outlining Filter's user-centred design process – one that clearly gave centre stage to users' requirements and kept 60% of designing in the pre-digital prototype phase. His final attack was on misuse of tools. 'Under 30s are slow to pick up a pen. If you use a computer, you are prone to be precise. Stay away from the computer as long as possible – it's an evil device; you won't want to throw away what you've worked on.'

So much for designers that don't prioritise usability... McQuaid and O'Reilly had both produced lists of the culture and communication problems that can interfere with their line of work. It was the usual stuff, but it had already been trumped by Scott's start. The lists included: designers that design for themselves and ignore user experience guidelines; software developers who are more interested in the technology than the user; usability people who tell engineers how to do their job; usability people who assume engineers don't care about usability.

But what formed the basis of a useful discussion, was O'Reilly's description of how he employed an agile software development process and the place of user feedback within it. By looking at contrasting methods and how these constrained people attempting to work together, the meeting was able to move into the new area of exploring systemic problems with implementing usability.

Agile methods involve a short cycle of development (analyse, develop, test), repeated often, and they put the emphasis on adaptation, rather than getting everything right once. O'Reilly describes one advantage in terms of improving quality: 60% of features are not used, but you are still expected to build them. With agile methods, you concentrate on the key 40% and when the business sees them, they say: 'OK, that's fine. Don't bother with the rest.' But this only happens if you are seeing them regularly during development.

His cycle for reporting back to stakeholders was every four weeks and this caused a great deal of debate. Could one factor in the contextual elements of a design if everything happened incrementally in this way; would user testing be possible to incorporate every month, can you chunk context like you can chunk functionality?

What this audience interest suggested was the need for a session devoted to the point where project management, development methods and UCD meet. Perhaps this session needs to be more than a short evening, because there will be a lot to discover for usability experts. But certainly an evening devoted to incorporating usability into project management seems the way forward.

Meantime, what was especially pleasing about the evening just gone is that the majority of people ignored the presented opportunity to sound misunderstood, recognised that the old debate about why people don't 'get' usability is dead and went straight for the learning point.

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