UX team skills

A colleague just pointed me in the direction of an interesting article over at UIE (User Interface Engineering) by the formidable Jared M. Spool. “Assessing Your Team’s UX Skills“, is a slightly different angle on my earlier post about “What can your web team do?”. Whilst UIE step back and look at the team as a whole, it’s nice to know I was thinking similar thoughts…

PS. Apologies for the last 8 months of radio silence. It’s a long story and not an interesting one, so I’ll keep it to myself for the time being, but needless to say, I’m back and hopefully this blog will up and running again from here on.

• Building great web teams - presentation from 2007 BarCamp Houston
• Waterfall bad, washing machine good - a practitioners experience of bringing Agile and UCD together.
  

1. Do not expect to know everything – the web moves too fast.
2. Give your team time to keep up with how fast the web moves.
3. Provide the emotional space for your web team to produce fantastic work.
4. Encourage constructive peer review and collaboration from all members of the web team (and your organisation in general).
5. Respect failures and mistakes but make sure the whole web team learns why things didn’t work.
6. Broaden the horizon of the web team beyond your direct competitors, and your market place – if you do business online, the toughest obstacles and competitors you will face are the ones that haven’t started yet.
7. Learn to manage frustration.  If you can understand and master it in yourself, you can recognise it in others and begin to help them too.
8. The web demands compromises – ensure that individuals do not see these as personal failures.
9. Support authentic investigation, genuine curiosity and an eagerness to learn, but also be able to focus and channel efforts into something tangible.
10. Always ask what can you learn from the things you do. Then ask how you can apply what you’ve learnt.

Today I came across an idea that intrigued me: Hatch Day. The idea is to get together people who have ideas about projects they want to start or move forward with people who like working on projects - and then to present a prototype at the end of it.

I’m always a fan of finding ways to move projects forward more quickly, and I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to do a day like this within a company. You could even have a final stage of assessing the prototypes by merit/commercial return, and viola - you’ve got yourself a development plan.

It certainly would be a novel way of tackling some of the difficulties around balancing different demands from the business.

Continue reading Incubating ideas Aussie style

With the rise of social networks online there appears to be a corresponding rise in social networking offline. Apart from the fascinating anthropological aspects, the impact on web and IT professionals shouldn’t be underestimated.

Last week I went to a Geek Girl Dinner (in fact it was the 2nd Anniversary of geek girl dinners). I have been to a few before, but this was by far the biggest I’ve attended. I said hello to some people I’d met previously, talked to some new people, put faces to a couple of email addresses and collected a few moo cards. Overall I enjoyed myself - but that’s not the point.

Prior to attending these type of events, I didn’t know many people who worked in the field of web, other than those I’d worked with before. When I needed advice I had a rather limited number of people I could talk to. Now have a much larger group of contacts to turn to and bat ideas around with – people from different industries, with different experiences and all passionate about working in their field. Continue reading Social networks and their physical counterparts

Balancing the maintenance of a website against developing new features is always tricky. However it’s a decision site owners should not shy away from – with finite resources and competitive marketplaces, it is one of the key decisions that will determine the success of a site.

Spend too much time keeping what you currently have current, and you’ll loose users and customers to other sites with expanding services.

Build and move on, without revisiting what’s already there, and nothing you build will last for very long.

And we haven’t got on to how much time should be spent optimising what you currently have.

Continue reading Maintenance vs. development

If you’re on the management team for a website, then here are some indicators of whether or not you’re in the right spot.

(There aren’t actually 101, but it sounded good in the title)

• You’re not afraid to fail
• You know that design is a hell of a lot more than just making things look pretty
• You use data to drive your decisions
• You know that “web 2.0” is just a phrase
• You understand the difference between content, presentation and behaviour
• You know blogging isn’t just a fad

Continue reading 101 indicators that you “get” the web

Balancing a web teams’ efforts between site maintenance and new features is a very important issue, but not one that will be discussed in this post (you’ll have to wait for that one). What will be discussed is one way to ensure you can understand where a web team actually spends most of its efforts.

Invariably for most sites there are maintenance jobs – fixing typos, updating links, replacing old content, etc. Good content management and tight QA will save your web team maintenance time, but there will always be updates to content and corrections to be made.

On the other hand, successful websites also need to keep evolving. Competitors release new features, users’ expectations change, new technology becomes available and new campaigns come along. This is most web teams’ raison d’etre.

Consistently monitoring how much effort your web team spends responding to these two challenges will mean you’re in a good position to ensure the web team’s efforts are aligned with your strategy.

Continue reading What does your web team actually do?

If you manage a website, that headline should be your mantra. Why? Because your website is only as good as you web team. And your web team is the only asset you have that can adapt itself to change.

Management guides have long highlighted the importance of people to an organisation, especially retaining talent. There’s nothing new in this, but what many people don’t appreciate is that its importance is proportional to the rate of change in an industry. Web has, and continues, to move at such a rapid rate that if you want to be successful tomorrow you have to focus on your web team today.

It’s very easy to get distracted by technology, or responding to your competitors’ new features, or to obsess over metrics…

But the quality of your web team must come first.

Don’t get me wrong, those are things you need to think about, but not at the expense of your web team. Ultimately, they are the ones who are the strongest influence on those elements. As the saying goes, “look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves” – look after your people and your site will look after itself.

Continue reading There is only one main priority and it is the web team

Has anyone else noticed the buzz around “Agile” development and user centred design (UCD)/user experience (UX) at the moment? If you’re part of a web team, you should probably be paying attention.

If you haven’t, below are a few links to recent documents talking about how the two come together. At the moment, if there is one key failing I can see for web teams, it is that most of the time software development is being discussed - not live websites. That’s an issue that will be pick up and addressed here in future posts…

Continue reading Agile development, user experience and web teams