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 […]

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Are Silos where UX goes to die?

Prototyping is a simple (not easy) catalyst for transformative change in UX I recently stumbled across a 2008 article from David Verba, “Sketching in code: the magic of prototyping.” In this article he shares the benefits that prototyping brought to his projects. “With prototypes” he wrote, “the focus is always on the application and making […]

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Agile for designers: case study of a process

Using ‘No Handoff’ to integrate design and development.  Background We are all familiar with project handoff: that universally hated period of inefficiency, disruption, and blame. Your precious work gets thrown over the fence, or you catch something that doesn’t make sense and have to do it anyway. Agile practices disrupted the handoff between developers, leadership, […]

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No Handoff brings Agile to Design and Discovery

Is the Waterfall method washing away your carefully crafted designs? Bring new Agile patterns to Design and Discovery with the No Handoff method. Though software development has embraced Agile, far too many of us still encounter waterfall or waterfall-adjacent processes in our design work. In the waterfall process we carefully think about and craft a […]

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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 […]

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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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No Handoff: close the gap between product and engineering

While agile broke down barriers between development processes and business goals, the handoff between Product and Engineering teams still persists. Ahh… Project handoff. That universally hated period of inefficiency and frustration, throwing your work over the fence hoping there is someone on the other side to catch it. Imagine a project where teams work together […]

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