I have been interested in Lean for a while, if nothing else than to explore if any of the techniques could be stolen for use with UX and service design. I’m only starting out on this journey about Lean, learning mainly from the local Perth Lean Meetup group.
This is the first, of hopefully a series, of short articles on what I learn from the Lean meetup.
So I expect that I’m bound to get some aspects of Lean wrong. That’s okay I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m too far off track.
Times have just got to change. I’m a little sick of living in a world that is regionalise into sales and licencing zones for no real reason besides to restrict sales due to some arcane money grubbing corporate policy.
What makes matters worse is people building experiences that highlight this and rub our face in it time and time again!
I regularly buy music online from various places, I tend to favour non DRM music, or if I can buy directly from the artist which is even better – I don’t like iTunes much at all.
I have been interested in agile process for a while, especial it’s use with UX techniques.
The other day I ran into a myth that there aren’t many User Experience Design people with skills that can work on agile teams.
It seems UX people aren’t very flexible.
This I find almost laughable, in fact most UX professionals I have found are extremely flexible, often changing tack or techniques as required, at a moments notice. Maybe we are too flexible.
The core of any agile process really is to have a role less team that can specialists with generalised skills.
As with any young industry we tend to endlessly debate the labels we should be placing on the User Experience based roles that we are conducting.
Along with this debate on the labels, we seem to be now in a blame game on who really is responsible as an industry (which I had no idea we where) for the on going career development of junior, mid level and senior UX people. Maybe better to just fix it folks.
As these elements of navel gazing have been going on quietly in the background the game has been changing. Maybe For the better.
Gary Barber
I’m an independent User Experience Consultant.
I design interfaces, build information architectures, HTML prototypes, run workshops on UX design, do user research and conduct usability & accessibility testing and audits.
I can work within your existing team or as an external consultant on a contract or adhoc basis.
You can contact me via my company, radharc or just email me.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
