“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer” – Emerson

“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it” – unknown

Olivia is 8 and a half months now and tonight, during dinner, she started clapping for the first time! Previously she’s only been slapping her forehead so this is a massive step forward!

She’s almost crawling. She can move backwards and turn 360 degrees but is yet to make the big step forward. I have been told to enjoy this period of non-mobility.

She’s also saying DA DA alot. I’m not delusional enough to think she’s trying to say Daddy … or am I?

It’s been a while since my last post. My blog’s looking a bit abandoned indeed. Well I’m back to give it a bit of attention. I’m coming to the end of a 10-month project re-vamping the sales and care sites for a major UK brand who offers phone, tv, broadband and mobile products. It’s also been my very first taste of agile. It’s definitely been a learning process and the 10 months have flown by.

I’ve worked with some amazing people and I’m proud to see some of the work that’s been delivered.

I’m going to use this blog post to reflect on the project for learning for future projects.

Office location. We’ve been working on client site for the past 6 months in Hammersmith. It’s not the usual agency studio-type envirnoment. The lack of a creative ‘buzz’ and exposure to other projects probably affected us. Just being able to get a view of what other people were up to not only serves to inspire but it also adds interest to the work day. Our facilities weren’t so good too. Never underestimate the importance of free coffee and tea making facilities. Free toast – even better. It’s the little things. After a few weeks that did get sorted but you notice the absence of home comforts, which just accentuate the slight feeling of isolation when placed – compared to London Bridge – in the middle of nowhere. Credit to management for popping in and bringing treats. Now we’re almost gone, the facilities are getting even better. We’ve got vending machines, coffee machines and an HD widescreen tv (great for the world cup that’s just started). Initial teething problems with getting online and printing proved frustrating – don’t ever take these for granted! I remember going entire days without web access … not much use when you’re trying to design a website. The lack of wall space also hampered our delivery. I’ve never seen this as an issue before but now, looking back, working on such a huge programme with multiple workstreams, multiple sites, multiple parts of the business, I would have really benefitted from a kind of entire-wall-sitemap. Somewhere I or anyone could go and get an instant visual representation of the site, or more importantly, what was done and what wasn’t. And then we should have stuck our wireframes and designs all over this wall so we could piece together different journeys and ensured acm consistently brilliant experience …

Agile. The thing with Agile is you have to do it properly for it to truly work. Our process was Agile up to a certain point – handing over to Tech. Initially this confusion led to alot of back-and-forth with technology about our documentation. Initially we thought light agile documentation would suffice. It didn’t and I soon recognised that what we needed to hand over, UX documentation-wise, needed to be much more detailed to be accepted. I guess some visibility at the start of the entire process would have helped. In the same way that a high-level sitemap at the beginning would have helped me not only plan the work, but it would have also helped me to see where each piece fitted in the site. I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable at the beginning about designing pages of a site but not knowing anything about the main navigation … but hey, ‘this is agile’. Good things about agile is how closely UX, design and dev – as well as BA and QA – worked together. I found this bit really enjoyable (I finally know what BAs do!). I learnt alot off these guys, not only about their work but also about their passion for what they do. Only today I told our tester that I really like her ‘bug updates’ email she sends round with this week’s ‘bug king or queen’. Brilliant and inspiring. Morning scrums were initially good. You got good visibility about who was doing what but it soon became apparent that when your team became just 2 people, it wasn’t so useful … especially if you sat next to each other. The taskboard was also a bit neglected at various points in the sprint – often only updated when reminded by PMs or when planning the next sprint. The thing with planning tasks is that when told to sit down and plan the next two weeks work you inevitably think (a) I can’t possibly capture everything I need to do right now and (b) what I do capture I can’t possibly estimate accurately. And in the end the tasks put on the board become so generic that you often don’t need to revisit the board for days. Actually, I sometimes had more detailed tasks on a tickable to-do list in my notepad – which is probably the wrong way to do Agile. On the other hand, working closely with clients is ace. And positive feedback off the back of a sprint review is always morale-boosting.

As mentioned earlier, an overview of the site (high-level sitemap) would hvae helped but an overview to the business would have been good too. Who the different stakeholders are and what their goals and priorities were would have been good. Maybe an early insight into technical platforms / limitations would have helped set expectations … no, scrap that … that would have just stifled creativity. And while we’re talking about expectations we really should have had all stakeholders agree the business requirements for every individual section – even those deemed a mere re-skin or light-touch UX. Tell you what, light-touch UX is a very difficult thing to do. As a UX working on a piece of work it’s hard not to try and make improvements.

Right. I think I’ve captured most key issues here. Baby is sound asleep and I’d be foolish not to take advantage of sleeping time!