Shawn Crowley | Atomic Spin

Organizational departments aren’t aligned with innovation

By Shawn Crowley | Published: April 20, 2012

Dedicated, poly-skilled project teams are more effective at delivering innovation projects than well-honed, departmentally-distributed, operationally-focused teams. The choice of using an internal vs. external team is often considered when planning how to take on a significant innovation project. Internal expertise and capacity are two common factors used to assess the viability of the internal team….

Posted in Iterative Development, Process & Practices, Project Management, Project Planning, Risk, User Experience | Tagged innovation, poly-skilled teams, product development | Leave a comment

Atomic Design Intern Summer 2012

By Shawn Crowley | Published: March 3, 2012

Update: All 2012 internship positions have been filled. Please keep Atomic in mind for next year. Atomic is in the midst of hiring our summer 2012 interns. We like to have a balance of interns coming from design and computer science related degree programs. As a design intern, you don’t need to know how to…

Posted in Company | Tagged Designer, Graphic Design, hiring, Internship, product development, Software, user experience, UX | Leave a comment

Usability Testing Summary Template

By Shawn Crowley | Published: February 21, 2012

Brittany and I recently created a usability test overview that aimed to summarize our test findings with clarity and brevity. You can download the template here. We designed our test scenarios using our usability starter kit templates. The starter kit templates made sure our testing session was organized and our tests were consistent. Rather than…

Posted in Process & Practices, Testing, Uncategorized, Usability | Tagged template, usability testing | 3 Comments

Designers are more valuable than programmers

By Shawn Crowley | Published: January 24, 2012

Designers are more valuable to software product development efforts than programmers. Designers will continue to fuel and shape innovative product development efforts as programmers fall by the wayside as a commodity to be cost managed.

Posted in Culture, Design & Development | Tagged agile, design, developer, innovation, interaction design, product development, programming, UX | 35 Comments

Continuous Integration for Design Concepts

By Shawn Crowley | Published: December 23, 2011

I recently enjoyed being a panel speaker at a Michigan Agile Enthusiasts event about big visible charts.

Posted in Iterative Development, Process & Practices, Prototyping, Testing, Tools, Usability, Visual Design | Tagged agile, Continuous Integration, design, testing, UX | Leave a comment

Inexpensive UX display boards: Cheap tools and good process

By Shawn Crowley | Published: November 30, 2011

When I travel to new office environments, I’m always on the lookout for interesting facilities practices to bring back to Atomic. When I attended the Balanced Team Conference last September at Hot Studio in San Francisco, I saw some neat foam core board displays showing their new facilities layout (the new facilities are very cool…

Posted in Design & Development, Process & Practices, Project Management, Tools, User Experience, Workplace | Tagged Context Scenarios, Design Constraints, Foam Core, personas, user experience, UX | 1 Comment

Duellr Customer Interviews Lessons Learned

By Shawn Crowley | Published: October 25, 2011

I’ve been working on Duellr with others at Atomic to help designers reduce time and stress when helping their clients make logo decisions. Before creating Duellr, we interviewed multiple designers to understand their logo design process and validate if they experienced stress helping clients make a final decision on a custom logo.

Posted in Business of Software, Startups | Tagged duellr, lean startup, user interviews, user research | Leave a comment

Balanced Team Conference 2011

By Shawn Crowley | Published: September 26, 2011

Kedron and I had a great time attending the Balanced Team Conference last weekend. The Balanced Team conference was a continuation of the Agile UX retreats started by Anders Ramsay and Lane Halley in early 2010 kicked off at Cooper.

Posted in Design & Development, Events, Iterative Development, Process & Practices, Project Management, Project Planning, Reviews | Tagged Agile UX, AUX, Balanced Team, Lean UX, poly-skilled teams | 3 Comments

Managing agile, Poly-skilled Teams with Intermediate Milestones

By Shawn Crowley | Published: August 28, 2011

During the myGRcitypoints project we used a backlog that integrated design and development tasks. To minimize rework, we strived to complete design and markup tasks before writing the related code. We thought an integrated backlog would allow for better collaboration and task sharing between team members (especially on IA, IxD or markup tasks that can…

Posted in Iterative Development, Process & Practices, Project Management | Tagged agile project management, poly-skilled teams | 1 Comment

Integrated Design and Development Backlogs

By Shawn Crowley | Published: July 27, 2011

I’ve previously written about Atomic’s poly-skilled team approach and mentioned some of the related challenges from integrating design and development. One challenge of integrating designers and developers into poly-skilled teams is the management of design and code related tasks. Atomic has tried working with both integrated and non-integrated backlogs. On the myGRcitypoints project, we opted for…

Posted in Iterative Development, Project Management, Project Planning | Tagged agile project management, backlog, balanced teams, poly-skilled teams | 5 Comments

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