We don’t have all of our patterns defined yet. So I am integrating the visual style into our Axure widget library. onHover of a secret hotspot in the top right of each widget, I popup the visual of that widget and the corresponding CSS. My Axure widget is styled as close to the visual as possible, but it ain’t Photoshop (or FW) so I feel that this is necessary. Thoughts?

Also, you said that “….Our QA team bases their tests on mocks, prototypes and a shared understanding of how the system is supposed to function. This is built through collaborative problem solving with te whole team…..”

Can you elaborate a little bit on this? What sort of mocks are you referring to? Do they exist in addition to the prototype? are they hi-fi? lo-fi? quasi-medium-fi? We don’t have a visual designer, so I struggle with how to ensure screens are built as designed. One thought is to integrate QA into your collaborative sessions every few days in a two-week sprint.

Great article man. I will keep fighting the good fight over here now that I have a sense of hope!

Before you were pairing up UX with your dev team, how did you convey system functionality i.e. error message, server responses, etc. to the dev team with only prototypes?

In the past we have created prototypes but always in addition to UI specs. Since part of our dev team is offshore, communicating intent can be challenging without providing explicit instructions. In the future, we would like to stop writing UI specs and only provided prototypes, but we are concerned that some of the details might get lost. We are currently using Axure which allows annotations to be included in each prototype, but is this enough?

1. Our qa team bases their tests on mocks, prototypes and a shared understanding of how the system is supposed to function. This is built through collaborative problem solving with te whole team.

2. Our UX and UI devs pair to create the experience in real time. This cross-functional pairing is highly effective and gets us to an experience much faster than before.

[Jeff]

I have two questions though, if I understood correctly, you stopped writing detailed design specs and moved to medium-high fidelity prototypes (fireworks) and now began to implement on-code design (programer+designer).

1. On what your QA team base their tests?
2. Isn’t on-code design lead to code iterations and thus lower the UX ROI?

But I’m not a fan of the design-by-committee approach taken by included the non-designers in the ideas and sketching phase.

I think user stories provide a new method of communication from the bus-dev/client guys to the design team to steer them away from their usual hideous UI sketches.