I recently had the pleasure of chatting with three extraordinary individuals who have been practicing Agile for the past several years.

The purpose of this conversation was to provide listeners with a plain language explanation of the Agile process and it’s implications for the future of software development and also the potential impact this will have on the User Experience discipline.

I decided to provide the unedited version of our conversation to model the kind of flow that is created when organizations are able to bring in open minded and passionate individuals to the Scrum and subsequent Sprints for each project.

Alla Zollers (@azollers) is a Senior Experience Designer at Mad*Pow. She specializes in creating holistic experiences that elegantly balance customer needs, business goals, and technical constraints.

Alla has worked in completely agile environments for the past 2 years, creating designs that are iterative and always feasible to implement.

Ryan Norris (@ryannorris) is a technical architect at Medullan, a provider of business and technology services based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Medullan delivers best-in-class technology solutions for the health care and life sciences industries by engaging with clients to deliver product and market strategies that accelerate time to market, as well as vendor-neutral, Agile software solutions for enterprise needs for organizations large and small. Ryan also maintains a personal blog about agile software delivery and technology.

Zachary Spencer (@zspencer) has been practicing agile development for the past two years.

He has done everything from working as a developer in an agile environment to full blown agile transformations. He enjoys writing about his experiences on his blog.

Agile Resources
Agile Manifesto
Succeeding with Agile by Mike Chohn
Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug
Bridging the Communication Gap – Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing by Gojko Adzic
The Art of Agile Software Development by James Shore
Money Ball by Michael Lewis

Many thanks to my most recent sponsor, the Information Architecture Institute, for promoting my upcoming workshops on User Experience Design, Information Architecture, and Writing for the Web.

Thank you again to Chris Baum and Christina Wodtke of Boxes and Arrows for providing me with the opportunity to share presentations through the Boxes and Arrows Podcast at the 11th Annual IA Summit in Phoenix. I’m hoping to have these posted within a week or two of the Summit wrapping up on April 11th.

Today I had the pleasure of talking with the Chief Experience Officer and Healthcare Principal at Mad*Pow, Amy Cueva.

Amy partners with clients like the New England Journal of Medicine, Google, Aetna, Fidelity, and Monster to create strong multi-channel experience strategies, intuitive digital experiences, and streamlined processes.

We discuss the many different ways social technologies can conceivably simplify communication flows, enhance access, increase information sharing, and augment timely collaboration, resulting in faster, more informed decisions, improving clinical outcomes.

You can download slides from Amy’s recent presentation to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Social Media and Patient-Centric Design: Facilitating Provider / Patient Relationships.

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are meant to provide primary care physicians with the ability to share comprehensive patient files, across hospitals and patient-teams, so that they can make better care decisions. There is enormous potential for integration of social networking technologies to enrich the EMR experience.

A few examples of Social networking for EMRs include:

* 2 doctors in different locations could treat the same patient or obtain opinions on treatment. They could both access the patient’s EMR, and deliberate possible diagnoses and treatment options.
* Doctor-to-doctor, and doctor-to-nurse communication could occur LIVE via Online chat, Voice (VOIP/Skype), Video (Webcam/Skype Video), Telephone.
* Communication could also occur asynchronously via Text message (Twitter/Yammer), Email, Voice (Voicemail/Voicethread), Video (Voicethread/Webcam).
* Doctors could digitally mark-up files in the EMR such as X-Rays to communicate visual thinking to their peers.
* The care team and the patient would benefit from the interaction but there is also downstream value in having the discussion and relevant subject matter parsed and elevated up to the larger community.

User experience design in the health care space is of keen importance. As designers we have the capability to expedite the diagnostic process, resulting in both proactive and preventative measures for treatment that is more comfortable and effective. We can reduce errors, reduce costs, and essentially improve outcomes for all involved.

President Obama’s stimulus package (ARRA) includes 19 billion dollars which has been earmarked for health care research, technology and improvements. In the next few years there will be a great deal of activity and change in this space. We have the ability to shape that change in a positive direction via the patient-centric design approach that comes naturally to us. We also have the opportunity to share assets and patterns and build the standards that will positively affect learnability, adoption and momentum.

The current medical system is in dire straights. We need to start looking at tools that are in place today without putting on blinders to both the current and future potential risks and barriers to success. A few of these include, the following:

* Doctors are outnumbered: There are many more patients than doctors.
* Frequency & access: How often do you have access to a doctor vs. access to a computer, phone or mobile device?
* The information is out there: In our minds, in websites and DBs. Tech and SM frees the info, makes it searchable/shareable.
* We have the tools: Healthcare is behind.
* People care: They are motivated, there is a strong sense of community, karma, give and take.
* It is already happening: The Pew Internet and American Life Project Survey says 61% of Americans go online for health information, with a majority turning to user-generated content.

Thank you to all of my listeners for another year of helping to provide greater context to the content we all share! Many new projects underway for 2010, two of which I’ll be sharing early in January!

Happy holidays and best wishes for a great New Year to friends, family, and colleagues around the world…Cheers!

Transcript for this Podcast

I had the pleasure of talking with Brad Nunnally about the importance of failure to innovate; moving teams and individuals to new ideas and future successes.

I first met Brad at this year’s IDEA conference in Toronto. You can read his brilliant overview of the two day event over on Johnny Holland.

Part of the inspiration for his three part article on failure came from this video by Scott Berkun.

In Part One Brad discusses the importance of Retrospectives and Documenting Warning Signs to learn from past mistakes.

In Part Two he covers the opposing yet equally important issues of Assigning Blame and Highlighting the Success of others.

In Part Three Brad discusses why it’s so important to Embrace Failure and to also keep an Open Mind realizing that everyone makes mistakes.

In our conversation, Brad and I note quotes from other UX professionals around the world. Their feedback can be found on the Wiki I created for this podcast.

Many thanks to Eric Reiss, Jan Jursa, and Valeska O’Leary for sharing their insights on the Wiki and to Daniel Szuc and Christian Crumlish who dropped me an email with their thoughts.

I’d like to encourage others within and outside of the UX industries to build on the questions provided on the Wiki.

I think you’ll find those who have garnered the most success in their industry are the ones who have failed more often than not. They are the ones who have had the courage to keep pursuing ideas, evolving them over time to learn from mistakes and create an even greater product or service than originally imagined.

At events like the IA Summit and the Interaction Design conference, I think we should be discussing the topic of failure and not just with / amongst presenters but as a common conversational thread with all attendees.

As a suggestion I believe conference organizers should provide a space where people can write, sketch, and share past failures and lessons learned. I saw this idea when I attended the first annual VizThink conference.

In addition to most workshops providing attendees the opportunity to share via sketching (see image below), large whiteboards were set up in the pre-conference area allowing others to draw out ideas which, in turn, encouraged discussion amongst participants about the illustrations.

Most recently, at the first annual UX Australia conference, Oliver Weidlich discussed several examples of interface failure.

To hear his 10 minute talk about this presentation make your way over to the UX Australia Media page. You can also subscribe to all the shows through their iTunes subscription.

Transcript for this Podcast