Immediately after I went on my last customer visits, we started scrum at work. In fact they were actually waiting for me to get to work on that Friday after my visits to get started. I am the only Human Factors Engineer at my office, that has over 100 engineers in it. I support everyone. Right before I left town, I sat in on 2 scrum teams, but there was no real UI work involved. Now we are doing a UI enhancement scrum, and I’ve never been busier. Fortunately for me, I enjoy being busy. I utilized my not-so-busy period at work, which I spent researching Human Factors and design methodologies. I also got active in the UX community, but now I have been thrown feet first into the fire.
I would say the biggest thing that I’ve noticed about scrum is that it brings issues that may have otherwise been missed to the surface. I design UI and functional items before they get to development. This has been an interesting process because we get requirements from Product Marketing, and at first glance, they may seem simple. Then I start mocking things up, and prototyping what the customer would experience and LOTS of questions come up. I think in the long run this will be a positive thing, because I help hash things out between Product Marketing, customers, before development. I bring my mock-ups in front of users before they are built to get feedback on the design.
The only thing that has become a concern to me about being consumed in the scrum process now is: will I have time to do the process research and customer research while I’m also creating designs for development. My goal has been to make sure that I do not alienate any of my internal customers; being responsive is very important to me. But there are higher-level Human Factors initiatives that I would like to work on, but I’m not sure if I will have time. I would like to take the customer data that I’ve collected, and create mental models to deliver design ideas to development.
Today I was audited by an ISO auditor. The auditor mentioned that he thought I should have some more visibility in my organization. I have personas that I created a while ago that have never been presented to development and test because I never got approvals back from marketing. This item took a backseat to all the new work I’ve been focusing on. I think I need to focus on communicating persona and mental model deliverables that will give the developers and testers more insight into our customers.