Designing with Agile

I’ve recently been making plans to work with a team of agile software developers. Here’s a great 10 minute video, by Hamid Shojaee that reviews the key points of the scrum implementation of agile and explains things like the product backlog, sprints and burn down charts: 

Here’s another video that is opinionated, redundant and too slowly paced, but still quite effective in converting team members to agile: 

Last but not least, here’s a great slide presentation, by Anders Ramsay that shows how user experience designers can fit into the agile software development framework: Anders Ramsay’s Designing with Agile Workshop Slides

What works best for your team? Do you use any off-the-shelf agile software tools? Please comment.

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Learning from User Interface Design Conference 15

As a promotion for the upcoming UI 16 conference in Boston November 7-9, 2011 Jared Spool is offering free on-demand access to last years proceedings!   UIE is making this a limited time offer -only good until October 13, 11:59 PM ET.

Pocket Dialing

On Saturday I was holding onto my phone, doing lots of things, and noticed I accidentally called a friend.  My iPhone showed that I was 15 seconds into a call to my friends Tracey & Vito.  (Hi again if you are reading this.)   This is not the first time this has happened.  I remember accidentally re-dialing a Hilton in Boston once.  After a friendly hello and sheepish explanation to the reservation clerk, I hung up.

On Saturday, I hung up on the accidental call and then purposely called my friends back to say hello and explain that my leg accidentally called them.  What a nice way to say “Hi” and add a little humor to one’s day…

If you’d like to avoid doing this you can put your iPhone in sleep mode and lock your touchscreen: http://www.ehow.com/how_2274575_lock-iphone.html.

iPhone sleep-wake button

Locking your phone will conserve your battery’s usage too.

Do you have a story about receiving or placing an accidental call?  Please comment.

Checking Your Calendar and Talking on the iPhone at the Same Time

Palm Pre

I was watching a demo of the Palm Pre which shows multitasking features and really great “Synergy” which allows you to check all your email in one place or view all of your contact information from one place and much more.  See: Palm Pre Video.

iPhone Calendar

With my iPhone I can talk on the phone and check my calendar at the same time.  BUT it’s hard because I can’t hear the person talking to me very well when I’m looking at the calendar.

Apple- can you please make the volume higher on the iPhone?