It’s not always easy to have an XD presence in a team, or to clients that are very new to the discipline. It’s also not always easy to talk about XD when everyone around the boardroom table is unfamiliar with it. The other scenario is that everyone thinks they know everything about it already, because they either know about UI or have used an interface before. As we know a whole lot more comes into experience design other than GUI design, or making it all look pretty.

XD debt:

Additionally, ensuring that XD debt gets recovered at some point in time on your project is really important. Keeping track of that debt is really quite difficult. Basically, when a compromise is made causes the user experience to suffer as a result, then quality is affected. If this happens continuously on your project, then you will end up with something unusable or pretty close to that anyway. This is why it’s important to keep track of that debt, and to ensure that you, as an XD, recoup it later down the line.

Why the weather forecast?

Everybody is familiar with weather forecasting symbols, for example Sunshine, cloudy outlook, rainy, etc…This is a useful language for people to use when talking about the quality of XD. I typically use a scale that runs from a rainbow experience to a thundercloud. This means that everyone on the team can understand what the quality of that particular feature is. I have used the scale on physical story cards to indicate how much of a compromise was made and what the resulting experience is. This can be subjective (the opinion of the XD team) or better still, come from user research results. You cold equally adapt this to express the current state of affairs from an XD perspective on a feature map, or as a subjective opinion from the XD team.

Benefits:

Everyone in the team grasps very quickly what the situation is, and they have an easy language to express it in. I overheard: “Well, we don’t need anymore thunder” and “Is that a rainbow experience?”

It should be stressed not it’s not always worth making everything a rainbow experience straight up. In our Agile environment, we expect a few cloudy experiences in the first iterations, but then the weather helps us to priorities where the XD work effort should be concentrated next. Sometimes rainy areas of a website will stay rainy for a while because they’re not used as much as a cloudy experience on a very important piece of website real estate.

It is really really simple.

Try it out and let me know how you go

Resources:

Free vector weather icons

The Displaying XD quality on physical story cards by I-Thought, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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