Presentation at Euro 2012, Rome, by Jim Kalbach and Carola Weller
Topics such as “Agile Design“ and “Lean UX“ are all the rage these days. With these approaches, designers seek to prototype, test and revise their designs quickly and with little documentation. Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation, or RITE for short, is a specific method that fits into this canon.
The key, we believe, is design collaboration—bringing stakeholders together. This does not just mean “design-by-committee,” where designers can easily get out-voted. On the contrary: putting designers, product managers and business stakeholders in the same room with the same stimuli gives designers a stronger voice in shaping the solution.
Of course, there were also challenges to our approach. For instance, not all stakeholders from the various departments saw the need to attend or didn’t know what to expect at first. (But after several rounds of RITE, they didn’t want to be left out.) In this presentation, we shared the difficulties we encountered and how to overcome them. We also talked about our modifications to the methodology, which allowed us to move faster and cover more ground quickly.