my agile approach to weekend projects

Four years of designing user interfaces in an agile software development environment and some things just sink in, inherently forming work habits that affect your personal projects.

Recently I decided to seriously learn CSS and perhaps a smidgen of JavaScript. My personal domain at www.although.net.au is the playground for web and user interface design experiments. The usual focus for my experiments is the display of my personal projects or commercial folio.

My goal for this project was to arrive at a design that uses CSS for all layouts on the page. However I digress as the learning continues and the subject of this post is my agile approach to weekend projects.

Previous projects involved numerous pages of sketched ideas that steadily increased in fidelity until 80-90% of the design was resolved. Sketching would be done over a period of days and a large volume would end up as recycled paper. Satisfied with the design, another large chunk of time was spent refining interaction and visual design in my favourite vector program. Once the design period was complete I would: construct my HTML (to the best of the visual editor’s ability); rigorously proof read and test links; and upload the completed files.

We now have a little baby (6 months old of last week – happy birthday sweetheart) in the house and the scope to spend a whole weekend and a majority of weeknights entrenched in my home office is no longer an option. My work needs to be done in short chunks of time – call each chunk of time a sprint if you will.

So I have a goal and I have a clear-ish idea of my content and very little idea of the final look and feel. With these ideas in hand I set about thinking how to apportion tasks into sprints that would vary in length depending on fatherly responsibilities. As a rough guide the longest sprint duration would be measured on time between naps where Mum could take baby for the whole period; approximately 4 hours. The shortest sprint would be about 15 minutes.

In the first few sprints I skipped the conceptual sketching phase and dove straight into visual and interaction design on the computer. The aim was to create a design I could live with and that could easily scale with visual and interaction updates.

With a suitable design plan I used a few sprints to organise and prepare image-based content; this was a massive task and I had to be smart about developing assets for re-use and for a design that would change. These early sprints formed my first iteration and while I didn’t have a shippable product, I had a clear path and a really good plan for the next weekend iteration.

So you get the idea that I am breaking up time between fatherly responsibilities into sprints and each collection of weekend sprints into iterations. Through three iterations I have evolved the interface design through three versions; I have written two versions of copy and reproduced image-based content once. All the changes were planned so each evolution of the design took less time.

Throughout iterations the initial goal remains and while I have implemented funky CSS rollovers on the main navigation, I still need to develop the CSS layout. I am reasonably confident I need a further two iterations to complete the initial goal. I have spiked the home page layout using CSS and have built a working prototype of coloured boxes that behave appropriately.

CSS is pretty darn logical and with time and practice, quite easy to understand; quietly I regret not having learnt CSS sooner. CSS is now evolving in a manner that defies my reliance on HTML tables to achieve a layout. Where design techniques required Photoshop and complex interactions required Flash or JavaScript; CSS is a much better option.

Anyway, back to agile. Working solo on a personal project I think I’ve maintained some semblance to the tenets described in the Agile Manifesto and its principles. As far as an index-carded kanban-ish view of the world, they live entirely in my head. Thinking about agile and reflecting on the outcomes has helped to illuminate my approach to design. While agile is a great approach to software development and as a user interface designer is integral to my professional design process; I find my life and work as a designer much more akin to kaizen.

In the spirit of kaizen (and agile) there’s a bunch of things I want to improve and my backlog lengthens with every viewing. Let me know what you think: www.although.net.au.

The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates, in Plato, Dialogues, Apology
Greek philosopher in Athens (469 BC - 399 BC)

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my long weekend

Many people asked me what my plans were or what I did over the recent Easter long weekend and my response was low-key and non-descript. Unlike my girlfriend Karolina, I'm not one to openly announce personal news to every person I encounter: it's far easier to write news on my blog and post some pretty pictures.

My long weekend consisted of painting and wall-papering our spare room in bright sunny yellows, sky blues (complete with fluffy white clouds) and vibrant candy coloured wallpaper. Normally, I'd make Karolina do all this hard work but as she is four months pregnant...it wasn't advisable.

Being our first child and my first attempt at interior decoration, life is rapidly changing in our little household.

hmmm

What a weird day - it's pouring, teeming rain while clear blue sky reigns in the distance. A rainbow made a brief appearance outside my window and yet apparently the rest of Australia is clear and cloudless!?

Nice day to be at home playing my new ukulele. Hmmm.

I call him/her bluey

We've a healthy population of Australian wildlife in St Peters. Considering our proximity to the city we have plenty of rainbow lorikeets, cockatoos, native minors and flying foxes.

Our population of skinks has also exploded recently, however, the last animal we expected to find in our courtyard was this blue tongue lizard! Last time I'd been this close to a blue tongue was around 20 years ago - growing up in the western suburbs of Sydney.

Needless to say he/she was a feisty one, hissing at our cat as we walked past the backdoor. We put him/her in the backyard and he/she headed straight for the one and only exit point. We're guessing that's the way he/she entered the yard - getting stuck in the courtyard due to a large step.

Good luck Bluey hope to see you again someday.

it's alive!

I've started looking into the Flickr API and how I can use it to make although look sexy and decrease the need for maintaining web pages.

I've taken the easy route with this version of although as I've used the Flickr Badge script to grab image thumbnails. Future versions will use the API as I have found the Badge script to be very limiting for my requirements.

Ultimately, I would like access to the larger image sizes which will effect the way I visually represent although. For a designer who chooses not to code I am finding this to be quite fun and also an interesting challenge.

although skateboards

Whipped these up over the weekend using my existing t-shirt designs. Hope you like them...although skateboards.