Userfocus Usability Newsletter, February 2014

Welcome to the February edition of the Userfocus usability and user experience newsletter!

• Message from the Editor
• Feature article: How red routes can help you take charge of your product backlog
• What we're reading
• Upcoming training courses
• User experience quotation of the month

Message from the Editor

These days I find myself working increasingly with teams struggling to make user experience work within Agile (specifically Scrum) environments. What turns out to be interesting is that although the development methodology is new, many of the problems are familiar. For example, since the dawn of product development, design teams have wrestled with the question of which functions to deploy first. In Scrum, they call this prioritising the product backlog. This month I've written an article on how we can apply the notion of red routes to answer that age-old question: what should we work on first?

I hope you find the article useful.

— David Travis

Feature article: How red routes can help you take charge of your product backlog

"Design is easy," writes branding expert Marty Neumeier. "All you do is stare at the screen until drops of blood form on your forehead." One element that makes design difficult is a lack of constraints. Focusing on your product's red routes provides the key constraint you need to ship a high value product from version 1. Read the article in full: How red routes can help you take charge of your product backlog.

What we’re reading

Some interesting usability-related articles that got our attention over the last month:

• The science behind fonts (and how they make you feel)
• "If you spend time perfecting' you'll waste time on the wrong things; you'll only work on the small stuff." Why worse is better.
• 21 card decks for creative problem solving, effective communication & strategic foresight
• White paper on how to do semi-structured qualitative studies, like contextual inquiry.
• Uncovering context with mobile diary studies.

Like these? Want more? Follow us on Twitter.

Usability Training: Now Booking

Web Usability: An Introduction to User Experience, May 12-13, London.

A fast-paced, 2-day immersion seminar that shows delegates how to boost sales and conversion rates, increase usage and improve customer satisfaction. More information about this training course: Web Usability: An Introduction to User Experience.

User Experience quotation of the month

“A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures.” — Ben Shneiderman.

Hungry for more?

Read previous newsletters.