Unifying Agile and User Experience with Live Style Guides

On January 25, 2012 I contributed to a talk with a few other colleagues about live style guides in rails applications. Case Commons and Pivotal Labs members showed off their live style guide they created for Casebook. I showed off the live style guide we created for Efficiency 2.0.

The talk was held at Pivotal Labs NYC. Their offices are just south of Union Square. Below is the snippet from the Meet-up event description:

One of the many emergent Agile UX tools enabling teams to more effectively design while building is the Live Style Guide.

It’s a great example of applying Agile thinking to UX practice. Here, instead of documenting UI patterns in a traditional static document, the style guide is built using the actual production technology, making it a living and continuously evolving bridge between design and development.

During this session, members of Case Commons, Pivotal Labs, and Efficiency 2.0 will demo implementations of this technique, discuss practical considerations, and compare and contrast their various approaches. We’ll follow their presentation with a panel-style Q&A.

We hope you can join us!

Agenda: 6:30 to 7:00pm - Space opens, meet & greet. 7:00 to 8:30pm - Presentation, discussion.

Reviews

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  Anders Ramsay
  Lots of practical info and insights about a concrete technique for integrating design and development.

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  Josh Seiden
  Best one yet. Great topic. Knowledgeable speakers. Good mix of concept and details. Nice job all!

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  Daniel
  I love the fact that this meetup was guided by cutting edge practitioners - rather than theorists. Examples were all concrete. Excellent.

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  Giff Constable
  Good topic + speakers did a good job talking at the high level and also drilling into practical specifics.

Over 100 people attended the talk!

We had a great turnout with lots of healthy discussions after the live style guide talk. Thank you to all who attended and contributed!