Can we make a manifesto? Here is my attempt:

Activity Centered Techniques for Agile Design

1 Intimacy of stories over iteration management

2 Breadth of screens to provide a vision over depth and detail

3 User Acceptance every iteration over usability tests

4 Design Standards over unique designs

Focusing on the activities that the personas of interest are performing within the

business environment, there X main things to perform.

1) Intimacy of stories over iteration management - Since the user interface designer

is acting as one of the customer/user surogates, he should know as much as possible

about the user's work environment. The designer should be able to create a portrait

of the stories the user goes through at any point in the business problem. The designer

should know this better than the user himself knows it. Don't get caught in the lie

of making stuff up. (this may be a significant role change for many designers)

2) Breadth of screens to provide a vision over depth and detail - Since the designer

has an intimacy with the stories he should be able to define the vision of where the

software application/ website is going to go. He should be able to architect the

flow, information, interaction and behaviors of the system across the breadth of the

application. This should be an going effort (a parallel process to engineering) to

define the vision and strategy of the product. Need to lead the developers to a vision.

The analogy of sailing works well in this situation. When you head out in the sail

boat you pick a point to sail to. However, the wind is not always at your back and you

need to tack back and forth always heading but not necessarily pointing toward where

you want to be. The task of the crew is to manuever the boat and keep it sailing well,

the captain needs to be focusing on where the boat and crew are going. The designer is

the captain and needs to keep his developers focused on the iteration and its tack

while keeping the point/ vision in mind.

3) User acceptance every iteration over usability test - Since the designer should have

working code, the process should be set up where users are invited in to work with the

application at every iteration. Feedback should be on 1st impressions, effectiveness

of solving their business problem (activities), and issues with interactions and behaviors.

4) Design standards over unique designs - Since the iterations are focused on creating

shippable code there is no time for futzing around with basic designs. (Complicated

designs may require a design spike.) Creating design standards that are baked into the

reusable code packages that developers use helps focus the design task on the story not

the nits. Style, layout, and behaviors of basic controls and combinations of controls

should be coded for resuse. (These may need to be early refactoring tasks.)