Jeff Patton on Story Mapping (September 1)

by Kevin Makice

One of the big challenges for UX specialists is finding ways to evangelize the value of good and continued user research throughout a development process. Most of the time, this work is relegated to post-production or as a one-time exercise during requirements gathering, instead of injecting a persistent voice of all the stakeholders into the ongoing process. The tension that sometimes arises between UX and Agile is the focus on building, quickly, stable product. Fortunately, both perspectives place great value on flexibility and adapting to change.

Jeff  Patton (@jeffPatton), the founder and list moderator of the agile-usability Yahoo discussion group and columnist with StickyMinds.com and IEEE Software, is giving a virtual seminar through UIE on Thursday, September 1, at 1:30p (Eastern). The talk is titled, “Story Mapping for UX Practitioners: Tying Agile & UX Together,” and promises to deliver insight on four key areas:

  1. How to build a story map from scratch—keep the focus on what people are doing, and bring user experience to the project early and often.
  2. How to overcome Agile dogma — use story maps as an intermediate structure to represent both the big business “whys” and the specific development “whats” of what the user is trying to do
  3. Alleviate the lack of common understanding when tying Agile & UX together — get everyone on the same page with the terms you introduce and define.
  4. Put this process in place for projects you’re working on right now — it’s never too late to put this technique in play.

Register for the virtual seminar by August 25 to get access to Jeff’s UX Agile overview, too.

User Interface Engineering (August 17, 2011, by Adam Churchill)