of these information spaces, that space must be indexed, resulting in a new index entity. That seems straightforward enough, but we spent a lot of time trying to agree on what ought to happen when one person happens to be exploring an infospace while someone else is trying to index the same space. Those discussions proved to be difficult simply because we had not made it explicit that the entity in question was an index. That is, we talked about it at first strictly as an information space. It wasn’t until after a few arguments that it became clear what we were actually talking about was an index of that information space.

Whenever the model can be precisely discussed, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary complexity. When a model is correctly and clearly defined right from the outset of a project, the only kind of feedback that ought to be required—and the only sort of change you should need to add to your sprints in subsequent iterations—has to do with the ways you want to expose things. For example, you might decide to change from a dropdown box to a list so users can be given faster access to something—with one click, rather than two. If you start out with a clear model, you’re probably not going to need to make any changes later that would likely have a significant impact on either the UI or the underlying architecture.

 

In developing a product for which there was no obvious equivalent in the marketplace, Agathos and Gosper were already sailing into somewhat uncharted waters. And there was yet another area where they would face the unknown: neither had ever used Agile to implement a UX design. Adding to this uncertainty was the Agile development methodology itself, where the tenets include the need to accept changes in requirements, even late in the development process.

Fortunately, the Polestar team soon embraced the iterative development process and all its inherent uncertainties. In fact, both Gosper and Agathos found Agile to be far more effective than the waterfall methodology for implementing UX designs. This doesn’t mean all was smooth sailing, however. Agile requires close collaboration be-

teRRY coatta
an area where
i think there is
huge potential
for trouble has
to do with the
feedback process
to ux design.
i’ve been through
that process and
have found it to
be extremely
challenging.

tween team members and frequent face-to-face communication, often between stakeholders with vastly different backgrounds and technical vocabularies. It’s therefore no surprise that one of the team’s biggest challenges had to do with making sure communication was as clear and effective as possible.

 

coatta: I understand that some UX designers feel Agile is less something to be worked with than something to be worked around. Yet, this was the first time you faced implementing a UX design using Agile, and it appears you absolutely loved it. Why is that?

GosPeR: In an ideal world, you would do all your contextual inquiry, paper prototyping, and formative testing before starting to actually write lines of code. In reality, because the turnaround time between product inception and product release continues to grow shorter and shorter, that simply isn’t possible. If the UX design is to be implemented within a waterfall project, then it’s hard to know how to take what you’re learning about your use cases and put that knowledge to work once the coding has begun.

In contrast, if you are embedded with the development team and you’re acquainted, tactically, with what they’re planning to accomplish two or three sprints down the road, you can start to plan how you’re going to test different aspects of the user experience in accordance with that.

coatta: In other words, you just feel your way along?

GosPeR: Yes, and it can be a little scary to dive right into development without knowing all the answers. And by that I don’t just mean that you haven’t had a chance to work through certain areas to make sure things make sense from an engineering perspective; you also can’t be sure about how to go about articulating the design because there hasn’t been time to iterate on that enough to get a good read on what’s likely to work best for the user. Then you have also got to take into account all the layers of development considerations. All of that comes together at the same time, so you’ve got to be very alert to everything that’s happening around you.

There is also a lot of back-and-forth