When I came to ThoughtWorks University a little less than a month ago, I set as my main goal the task of discovering what kinds of User Centered Design practices were occuring at ThoughtWorks, and how I could help progress those tasks. After two blazingly fast weeks of class, I’ve learned a lot, hopefully taught a little, and have come to this point surprisingly impressed at the user-centric ideas that shine through in the lessons here at TW, and possibly in Agile Development in general.

Many of the analysis techniques in use here align closely with a number of standard HCI practices. For example, last week we were taught a lesson about how to best gain knowledge about the organization, business process, and/or needs of the client. The lesson reminded me so much of Contextual Design, an analysis and design methodology that has been around the HCI field since the early-1990s, which makes it quite ancient in the field. I was completely staggered to learn that the lesson was not based on CD, and even more surprised to learn that the trainer had not heard of it at all.

Further lessons have discussed External Cognition (pdf link), process modeling, and interview techniques that would make most HCI-designers proud. We’ve also learned about how to incorporate Personas and Scenarios into our analysis work. Not to mention the fact that user stories, which guide the development of specific software functionality, are based directly on user needs (as mentioned earlier).

The fact that these practices are built directly into the system is uplifting for an Interaction Designer like myself. Now, I take it as part of my responsibility to point out when these known techniques are used, teach people their formal names, and discover how we can further leverage their strengths, while being aware of their weaknesses. Of course, it’s also important to add new tools to the TW toolkit, which I plan on doing.

So far, though, I am impressed by the User Centricity of the processes here at ThoughtWorks. Score one for the users.