“Designers shouldn’t ALSO have to code!” This is a refrain I hear a lot. Some designers feel working with code is too complex; others that it is exploitative. They are not wrong. But prototyping is a transformative practice with profound implications for design. Contributing to a prototype opens new ways of communicating with users and […]
Category: Design & Prototyping
Design and prototyping for no-handoff agile
Ending design handoff: this is our fight
If we, as designers, don’t fight to end the design handoff sh** show, then who will? Project handoff is one of the most inefficient and painful steps in software development. Designers and developers both hate it. Handoff leads to a false antagonism between design and development teams. Designers fight to “be in the room”, but […]
Why I moved on from Figma
Why I moved on from Figma This is not an anti-Figma post. We need many tools and processes for the many designers and design challenges out there. This is a post describing why I no longer user Figma, and what process is more efficient for me. My work is a particular flavor of UX and Design: […]
Is Agile an anti-design pattern?
How Agile leaves design out, and what we can do about it. You might not guess it from the title of this article, but I love Agile. I work in UX, I lead web projects, and I never want to go back to the time before Agile. Why the headline, then? Because, in addition to being […]
The false promise of the Design Sprint
The existence of the design sprint is interesting because it directly speaks to the challenges we face integrating design into our teams and projects. Much has been written about whether the design sprint is a true sprint (nope, but who cares [1]) but less has been said about why they exist in the first place, […]
Sketching with code: the prototype primer
Prototyping is at the heart of No Handoff. Following is a quick primer on how a prototype sets the stage for eliminating unnecessary handoff. Not everyone can understand a technical spec sheet or can translate a vision statement into actionable items; everyone understands a website. Prototyping from the earliest stages of a project makes communication […]
Sprint 0 offers zero value.
If you work in web development chances are you are using some form of agile. A current trend is the “Sprint 0”. What is it? Why has it stuck around? And why does it offer so little value to the agile project? Sprint 0 is often what the period before diving into the iterative agile […]
Dual-track agile is a game-changer for designers
As a UX manager I have found one of the stickiest challenges I face is fully integrating design and development teams. The pace of each discipline is different, so is their vocabulary, the information that drives their work, and their intermediate goals. I developed the no-handoff agile method to address these challenges, and one of […]
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