Gamification seems to have been the big thing for a while. Maybe we have heard too much of it. Some would say we have been over sold on gamification, making it the wonder child that will make your websites work and attract and keep customers.
Gamification by Design – by Gabe Zichermann and Chris Cunningham is the recommended discussion seed book for UXPerth this month (April 2012). I don’t often review the books for UXPerth, unless they are amazingly outstanding or something a lot worse.
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.
When was the last time you read about how to apply a certain UX technique in detail. Or read about the failure of a method in particular situation, and the subsequent analysis as to why.
Yes within the web industry we have the zealots, true believers or the like. These are the people who back and promote causes towards best practice, inclusive design, standards adoption to responsive design.
Sure they will talk about their successes and sometimes document them .
Still it’s rare they talk about their failures.
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.
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