Jon’s ranting about Agile here, but it could equally apply to design systems:
Agile and design is like looking at a picture through a keyhole. By slicing big things into smaller things, designers must work incrementally. Its this incrementalism that can lead to what I call the ‘Frankensteining’ of a digital product or service.
Some ideas on the best of use of time in sprint zero of an agile project.
- Understand your context
- Identify risks
- Understand the business process
- Get testing infrastructure
- Understand quality attributes
- Get to know the people
- Prepare an initial product backlog
- Build a walking skeleton/spike
- Build a learning backlog
Cennydd enumerates what design sprints are good for:
And also what they’re not so good for:
If you’re intrigued by the kind of design sprints I wrote about recently, here’s a handy collection of resources to get you going.
- Pre-sprint
- Understand: Gather existing knowledge, expose assumptions and unknowns
- Diverge: Illuminating all possible paths
- Converge: Choose the right path
- Prototype: Quickly build the right path
- Test & Learn: Test the right path
Myself and Batesy spent last week in Ipswich doing an intense design sprint with Suffolk Libraries. Leon has written up process from his perspective as the client—I’ll try to get a case study up on the Clearleft website soon.
This is really great write-up; it captures the sense of organised chaos:
I can’t recommend this kind of research sprint enough. We got a report, detailed technical validation of an idea, mock ups and a plan for how to proceed, while getting staff and stakeholders involved in the project — all in the space of 5 days.
Really interesting to see how Jason, Lyza, and co. are handling the process side of responsive design by using Agile sprints. This is how we’re doing it at Clearleft too.
There’s a really good point in here about starting with small-screen sketching:
For most of the sprint, we focus on small screens. We’re often asked how things will work on wider screens early in a sprint, but we try to resist thinking about that yet.
If you’ve managed to organize your life to fit inside a New York City apartment, you’re not going to have any trouble adjusting to a big house in the suburbs. The same is true of responsive designs.
If you nail the small screen design, the larger sizes will be easy by comparison.
Jon writes about the difficulty of maintaining an overall design vision when you’re working to an agile methodology, slicing up work into sprints.
This pairs nicely with Mark’s recent podcast episode: On Agile.