You can jumpstart Agile IxD processes with concept graphing
As an Agile interaction designer, you need to be able to quickly represent problems.
Using the lightweight concept graphing approach I described in yesterday’s post on Concept Graphing, you can rapidly make mental models. This gives Agile teams a metacognitive scaffolding for user-centric solution design.
Semantic relationships and built-in grammar make Conceptual Graph Structures unique. Nodes and arcs can only be connected in “legal” ways, an approach derived from cognitive task analysis and research in story telling.
As I described yesterday, six types of agency can be linked via eighteen interaction types to indicate relationships (e.g. “event” and “goal” connect via an “initiates” arc). Workflows, taxonomies, domains, goal hierarchies, causal relationships, and more are built by simply snapping arcs to nodes.
At a high level, understand what you’re going to build
You can use the process of building revisits requirements throughout the lifecycle of a project.
It’s not a quick and easy, down and dirty approach. There is rigor to it, a formal process. It requires research with end-users, and analysis using cognitive tools that have to be learned. However, it is collaborative, and it works.
Download a presentation on how concept graphing fits into an overall requirements elicitation process. I delivered this presentation with colleague Scott Confer at the Information Architecture Summit 2007 in Las Vegas, and then again in Barcelona at the EuroIA 2008
Other posts on the topic of Conceptual Graph Structures
http://onemind.com/2010/01/27/conceptual-graph-structures-part-1/
http://onemind.com/2010/01/29/conceptual-graph-structures-part-3/
http://onemind.com/2010/02/03/conceptual-graph-structures-part-4/
http://onemind.com/2010/02/04/conceptual-graph-structures-visio-stencil-download/
Sallie Gordon-Becker, working with colleagues, developed the Conceptual Graph Structures (CGS) process. The arc structure is drawn from Arthur Graesser’s research into how people tell stories. The CGS guides, templates and instructions for the use of Conceptual Graph Structures were developed by myself and my colleague Scott Confer.The Visio stencil was developed by myself, Scott Confer and Andrew Rice.
