Demos

Designing the iPhone App Experience: IxD & Agile

Session Title

Designing the iPhone App Experience: IxD & Agile

Presenter

Uday Gajendar

Session Type: Demonstration

Curious to hear from an interaction designer the inside story of how an iPhone App was born, from whiteboard sketches to a touchable, live code build? This demo showcases the core social calendaring and event management features of a novel iPhone App and its sister website. Perhaps more important than the App is the story of how it was born on a tablecloth sketch at a local Afghan restaurant in Sunnyvale, and the emergence of a process combining interaction design and Agile development approaches.

The following points will be emphasized:

* Collaboratively unpacking the extensive UI functionality and content into a product architecture map

* Paper sketch wireframes to rapidly communicate with off-shore developers the UI behavior and layouts

* Going “hi-res” (as pixel perfect comps) very quickly and early in the design cycle to evaluate and propagate the vision across the team and potential customers/clients

* Sprint/scrum cycles and debugging of the UI iteratively every week with design changes in real-time

The demo will conclude with lessons learned and recommendations for those who wish to attempt a similar iPhone + website synchronicity of user experience using Agile approaches.

Biography

Uday Gajendar is a prolific interaction designer with almost a decade of experience. His work has spanned enterprise software, creative tools, Web and mobile apps, and VOIP devices at Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, and other Silicon Valley firms like Netflix. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s IxD Program, Gajendar advances the design field with discussions about beauty, leadership, and strategy, for venues like IDSA, IA Summit, and Silicon Valley Codecamp. He has also taught interaction design at San José State University. For further musings on design, visit his blog at www.ghostinthepixel.com.