That goal: Build for day one. Don’t focus on what’s to come a year from now or even three months from now. Focus on your first release.
We found, over our company’s existence, that collecting data doesn’t have to be an expensive venture. Nor does it have to be a long-drawn-out, time-consuming phase of a project. As agile designers and developers, we collect data during the life span of the project.
As product designers and developers, we solve problems that our users encounter. Our work, hopefully, provides solutions to tasks that either take users too long to complete, confuse them or didn’t exist in the first place. But how do we determine what solutions or features are needed? Beyond data and interviewing users, we need a…
For the past several years, we have been working to develop a better agile process. We revised everything from how our designers and developers work together to how we communicate feature updates, bug fixes, and deployments to our clients.
Sass provides many useful features. It gives web designers and developers the ability to DRY up our code with mixins, maps and loops. It gives us a way to split up large files, but yet still cascade our stylesheets. And most importantly, it gives us variables.
How do we solve this problem? How do we know if it’s time to refactor and fix these hacks / quick implementations? When is it worth it to invest a few extra hours or days to create a better component, module, stylesheet, script, etc.?
Spool, a founder of User Interface Engineering which is a usability research organization, said, “Anyone who influences what the design becomes is the designer. This includes developers, PMs, even corporate legal. All are the designers.”
Here’s the problem. Designing prototypes for clients in Sketch, Photoshop or other tools don’t always show realistic expectations of what the real-world product will represent. These tools are powerful, helpful and easy to use — for the most part. They allow designers to create beautiful designs for conversation purposes and marketing material. But, they are static. Additionally,…
Crafting a great process takes time. It takes trial and error. More often then not you have to fail as an organization, as a team and as individuals before you can shape the right process.