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What’s the point of an agile standup meeting?

Gone are the days of 30-minute status meetings where most people are half-asleep or pecking away on their laptops, oblivious to what’s being said. Agile standups are the leaner, more efficient cousin of status meetings where attendees actually stand up. On our feet, we’re more focused, attentive, and concise. It’s science!

Whether you need robust tools for planning and tracking projects, communicating with coworkers, deploying products, or just some general tips on how to run an agile shop (and how to run them Rong?), Atlassian is here to offer you the tools and advice you need to get the most out of your agile practice.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

David Streitfeld takes an interesting look at the complicated relationship between digital and physical books in Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind. This part jumped out at me, because it points to a mistake companies often make:

“A lot of these solutions were born out of a programmer’s ability to do something rather than the reader’s enthusiasm for things they need,” said Peter Meyers, author of “Breaking the Page,” a forthcoming look at the digital transformation of books. “We pursued distractions and called them enhancements.”

As Barbara Nelson points out in Who Needs Product Management?:

It is vastly easier to identify market problems and solve them with technology than it is to find buyers for your existing technology.

That’s the mistake that many ebook companies made. They let technology lead, where the better solution is to be led by user needs.

Lisa Maria Martin gives some advice on What To Do With Those Dreaded FAQs:

These all underscore FAQs’ fatal flaw: they are content without context, delivered without regard for the larger experience of the website. You can hear the absurdity in the name itself: if users are asking the same questions so frequently, then there is an obvious gulf between their needs and the site content. (And if not, then we have a labeling problem.) Instead of sending users to a jumble of maybe-it’s-here-maybe-it’s-not questions, the answers to FAQs should be found naturally throughout a website. They are not separated, not isolated, not other. They are the content.

We’re definitely in agreement about that. A while I go I wrote this:

Most users don’t know what FAQ stands for, and besides, it’s bad practice to answer questions outside the context people want to ask them in. Figure out where in the process each question in your FAQ might come up, and provide the answer right there within the flow. Don’t expect people to click to a different page to find the information they need.

By the way, 24 ways is a collection of fantastic design and development articles and tutorials for advent. If it’s not part of your daily reading yet, make it so!

So much has been written about the disastrous launch of healthcare.gov. But Sheryl Solberg and Michael Shear’s Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Care Site, and Obama hit especially close to home. Much of it reads like any number of software development projects I’ve been involved in over the years:

In Herndon, as engineers tried to come to grips with repeated crashes, a host of problems were becoming apparent: inadequate capacity in its data center and sloppy computer code, partly the result of rushed work amid the rapidly changing specifications issued by the government. […]

The website had barely been tested before it went live, so a large number of software and hardware defects had not been uncovered. Fixing the account creation software simply exposed other problems; people still could not register to buy insurance. A system intended to handle 50,000 simultaneous users was fundamentally unstable, unable to handle even a tiny fraction of that. As few as 500 users crippled it, according to people involved.

Rushed work amid rapidly changing specifications… No testing before going live…

Let him who has never experienced issues like that on a project cast the first negative blog post.

Andy Beaumont wrote a great piece about his popular Tab Closed; Didn’t Read Tumblr site, which documents websites that obscure their content behind modal overlays. His point on analytics in The Value of Content is spot on:

Analytics only tell you part of the story — if that’s all you bother to find out, and you have absolute faith in those numbers, then you’re going to end up putting a modal overlay on your site. Analytics will tell you that you got more “conversions”. Analytics will show you rising graphs and bigger numbers. You will show these to your boss or your client. They will falsely conclude that people love these modal overlays.

But they don’t. Nobody likes them. Conversions are not people. If you want the whole story here you should also be sat in a room testing this modal overlay with real people. Ask them questions.

Once again, this points to how important research triangulation is to make good decisions based on insights, not just data. Real insights are found at the intersection of different research methods. Not over in the corner with just one method.

There are a few pieces on the topic of what makes a design good that jumped out at me recently. First, I like this approach from Uday Gajendar in What is good design?:

So what is “good design”? It’s an attitude of design-driven excellence (from strategy to delivery), a process of iteration and creativity, a mentality of enabling humanistic achievement for people, and a value system grounded in excellence of craft with a magnanimous bent towards what’s best for customers: appropriate, empowering, delightful.

Jon Bell talks about “Of Course” Design:

When people try to design magical interfaces, they’re often aspiring for the “wow” moment, but that’s the wrong focus. Designers should instead be focusing on “of course” moments, as in “of course it works like that.” Most product design should be so obvious it elicits no response.

Finally, Randy Hunt implores designers to Stop Trying To Be So Damned Clever:

During the design process, you can easily want to surprise and delight the user. So you create a design element — an interaction pattern, a naming scheme, a symbol, and so on — that is fresh and extremely inventive. However, the cleverness of your creation obscures the intent of the product. And the cleverness of that first impression doesn’t hold up over time — and I don’t mean over years; I mean over only the first few moments of use. After that first rush of newness, if the intended value of the product is not clear, or the functional intent isn’t obvious, the novel idea means nothing.

All three posts are worth reading in detail for their different points of view that point to similar definitions of good design.

Thanks to Pencils.com for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week!

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

I’m a little hesitant to believe these kinds of stats without seeing the actual research (and you have to pay for this report, which makes it even harder to verify), but Voxburner claims that 62% of 16-24s prefer books as physical products. That’s interesting in itself, but even more interesting is the reasons they cite:

There is less affection towards electronic versions of books. Whereas age is shown in the spine of each book — and commitment by the size of one’s bookshelf — digital files have no distinguishing characteristic. Most books adhere to the same fonts, as defined by the standards of ebook readers, and e-ink displays are void of any images besides the cover due to the lack of colour.

One of the things we sometimes miss in the ebook vs. physical book debate is that some of the inherent benefits of physical books have nothing to do with the act of reading. The experience of reading an ebook might be very similar to reading a physical book, but your Kindle doesn’t give you bragging rights. No one can walk into your house and see what kind of person you are just by looking at your Kindle — but they can learn a great deal by walking past bookshelves filled with the words that represent how you want the world to perceive you.

We often forget that physical products speak to a predisposition that digital products simply cannot counter: our own vanity.