SPHERE OF INFLUENCE, INC. – software studios and services
Thad Scheer
Why we aren't gaga over user stories
Anyone familiar with Sphere of Influence might know that we don’t embrace user stories as a central component of the methodology. Here’s why:
We think product design and product innovation suffer. One of the most delicate aspects of application development is the product level design. Selecting great features and designing a cohesive product experience (Px) requires deliberate creative expression. While user stores might not prohibit Px design, they do not encourage it – and can discourage it.
At the end of the day it’s about using the best techniques available to create the best Px possible. One of the rules I live by is that anything you get for free is generally crap. If you don’t pay for Px then the expectation is that it comes for free as part of some other activity or approach. This is the pervasive attitude towards product design and innovation that I see in the Agile community. There’s a mind-set that the industry doesn’t pay for creativity, it just happens. It’s part of the DNA.
Bull!
The quality of the Px I see in most software, yes Agile too, is astonishingly bad.
This results from software projects that use development teams, not design teams. Most Agile projects function with little or nothing in their methodological diet that a design firm would appreciate. Software projects hire graphic artists to design chrome for the UI, but UI design is just a tiny part of user experience (Ux), and Ux is just a tiny part of Px. Great design must be the centerpiece of a project, not a step in postproduction.
At Sphere, our approach to application development is inspired by what Ideo founder David Kelley calls “design thinking”, and our mission is to apply design thinking to software. Sorry, advertisement. However, as an Agile company we sometimes find ourselves in conflict with the practices common to Agile.
When I see teams covering the walls of a collaboration space with story cards I cringe. Why? Because I know that the Px will eventually be a patchwork of these floating stories. I know that for most of these projects there is no previsiualization of the complete Px, thus limited opportunity for the creative people to be creative or “delete” bad design.
Previsualization is essential. However, Agile depends on intense closed loop iterations as a substitute for previsualization, creativity, and innovation. That's a bummer!
Stories are sized and shaped for developers, not users. When requirements are derived from story cards, product design isn’t crafted – it just happens. That's another bummer!
Design rules!