Blog.

Happy Chinese New Years! I’m currently in Houston as part of a series of trips for user research. Needless to say, it is quite tiring with short travel duration (2 day trips) and adjusting the to the 2-3 hour shifts in time zone. It’s pretty interesting studying the insurance industry and the entire claims handling process from both the automobile and medical side. There’s a lot I want to share on my experiences, but I plan on putting it all together when all my current research plans are completed and I (hopefully) am in the midst of moving on to the next chapter of my life!

The big topic in 2012 for me is and will continue to be the shift to Agile and how user experience can effectively integrate itself into the process given a significant number of obstacles. One of the largest problems is, due to limited resources, the UX designer is floating between 7-14 sprint teams and between different products on different time boxes. For now, there are two ideas we are looking to explore:

UX is setup as sprint teams with a backlog that draws from all product delivery teams that need UX work. The idea is to avoid multitasking and allocating the resources and focus to completing user stories one at a time. The largest problem here is that the PSI lengths are different between products as we transition to Agile (especially between company divisions).

Another idea was setting up a “UX runway” similar to the intentional “architectural runway.” I haven’t quite given this enough thought, but I’m hesitant with this approach as I feel that it doesn’t solve the issues for the designer.

I’ve also starting reading up on Lean UX, which I’m thinking is the direction that we want to work towards…

Going to try to start blogging on a regular basis (hopefully at least bi-weekly, but if not, maybe monthly). For now, I’m really just visioning this as a method for me to record down thoughts (design ideas, inspiration, reviews, etc). Also, thanks for hosting Eddie :)