Oh no they aren’t…

http://www.jeep.co.za

Your point about granularity is very good – and helpful!

If you just list your overall goals on your to-do list, you can find that you never get a chance to cross anything off.

In fact it can stop you dead in your tracks. You can’t work out how to achieve the whole goal at once, so you leave it.

I’m finding it’s very true working with agile development teams. If you put a big feature into the backlog, it just sort of sits there and people get angry about it. If you break it down into sub-features, the developers can tackle it more readily.

The concept of “Flow” is very important to my team and I during our work day. I find that by breaking tasks down into the right level of granularity, you are able to focus more on the task at hand, have an increased sense of achievement, and you end up being much more productive and effective.

In terms of user experience for the things we design (small-screen/mobile applications), we take the attitude of producing interfaces which ask the user the minimal number of questions to get to their end goal. We find that by doing so, the user is able to intuitively progress through a series of steps with minimal effort. It sounds obvious, but it’s actually very hard to do when battling against the needs of the commercial world.