Adrian Howard › Comments

"It doesn't take much distance before a team feels the negative effects of distribution - the effectiveness of collaboration degrades rapidly with physical distance. People located closer in a building are more likely to collaborate (Kraut, Egido & Galegher 1990). Even at short distances, 3 feet vs. 20 feet, there is an effect (Sensenig & Reed 1972). A distance of 100 feet may be no better than several miles (Allen 1977). A field study of radically collocated software development teams,[...], showed significantly higher productivity and satisfaction than industry benchmarks and past projects within the firm (Teasley et al., 2002). Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases." - Adrian Howard

"Based on the empirical evidence, we have constructed a model of how remote communication and knowledge management, cultural diversity and time differences negatively impact requirements gathering, negotiations and specifications. Findings reveal that aspects such as a lack of a common understanding of requirements, together with a reduced awareness of a working local context, a trust level and an ability to share work artefacts significantly challenge the effective collaboration of remote stakeholders in negotiating a set of requirements that satisfies geographically distributed customers" - Adrian Howard

"Our results show that, compared to same-site work, cross-site work takes much longer and requires more people for work of equal size and complexity. We also report a strong relationship between delay in cross-site work and the degree to which remote colleagues are perceived to help out when workloads are heavy" - Adrian Howard

"Our findings reveal that: software developers have different types of coordination needs; coordination across sites is more challenging than within a site; team knowledge helps members coordinate, but more so when they are separated by geographic distance; and the effect of different types of team knowledge on coordination effectiveness differs between co-located and geographically dispersed collaborators." - Adrian Howard

"One key finding is that distributed work items appear to take about two and one-half times as long to complete as similar items where all the work is colocated" - Adrian Howard

Our study of six teams that experienced radical collocation showed that in this setting they produced remarkable productivity improvements. Although the teammates were not looking forward to working in close quarters, over time they realized the benefits of having people at hand, both for coordination, problem solving and learning.Teams in these warrooms showed a doubling of productivity - Adrian Howard

Despite the positive impact of emerging communication technologies on scientific research, our results provide striking evidence for the role of physical proximity as a predictor of the impact of collaborations. - Adrian Howard

Groups with high common ground and loosely coupled work, with readiness both for collaboration and collaboration technology, have a chance at succeeding with remote work. Deviations from each of these create strain on the relationships among teammates and require changes in the work or processes of collaboration to succeed. Often they do not succeed because distance still matters - Adrian Howard

Hmmm... I think this is overgeneralising... - Adrian Howard

Another agile-is-just-delivery article... Hmm... another one for agile-myths. - Adrian Howard

"Stop designing alone". Words to live by. - Adrian Howard

UX is only one slice of the leadership pie. Other domains do similar things. - Adrian Howard

neurostimulator - Adrian Howard

I like the pricing model for the e-book :-) - Adrian Howard

Original Designers Workbook - Adrian Howard

Handy jQuery plugin for making a chunk of text fit a container - Adrian Howard

NIce piece discussing some of the common mistakes folk make with A/B testing - Adrian Howard

"We’ve been watching a lot of Clicktale recordings of form usage and we noticed that just about everyone scrolls down to the bottom of the form, then back up, before they start filling out the form. So we wanted the redesigned form to be markedly shorter than the one it was replacing" - Adrian Howard

Cute little tool to preview twitter backgrounds at different resolutions. - Adrian Howard

Nice metaphor for iterative delivery of products - Adrian Howard

Yet Another CSS Framework - Adrian Howard

In all my years of usability testing I've never had a _single_ person say anything nice about links opening in new windows. Best case you're user isn't actually aided in any way. Worse case they end up confused and can't get back to your site! Don't do it. - Adrian Howard

Simple little PHP CMS. Reminds me of cushycms - but hosted. Per-domain licence. - Adrian Howard

Nice little personal site/blog design. - Adrian Howard

Like the light use of sketching / handwriting with the rest of the site. - Adrian Howard

Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism - I just _love_ this. If only for the fact that the title is so unwieldy that it will never get co-opted like "agile" has in many places. - Adrian Howard

Nice looking freely downloadable Python introductory book - Adrian Howard

Nice simple design for large-ish agency. Simple. Fast. Focussed around a blog, stories and people. - Adrian Howard

Small and minimal CSS framework - looks useful for quick prototypes - Adrian Howard

A neat one line CSS grid framework hack. - Adrian Howard