Agile Dev and Lean UX

Agile Dev and Lean UX

• 1.
  Agile Development +Lean UX Lunch & Learn 9/6/2012 Karri Ojanen Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 2.
  Agile Development +Lean UX • There’s a lot of shared belief between Agile and Lean UX • Agile development is… “a collection of methodologies that promote highly interactive and incremental development of software”, “the opposite of waterfall” • Lean UX is… “a set of practices a design team can adopt to move towards Agile-like philosophy” BUT it’s different from forcing designers to work within the realm of Agile rituals Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 3.
  What is UXD? Companyconfidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 4.
  User Experience Design • Focus: • Optimize the product around how users can, want, or need to use the product, rather than forcing the users to change their behavior to accommodate the product • Process: • Who are the users? • Learn as much as you can about them in the context of the problem you’re trying to solve for them • Take those learnings and your knowledge of design best practices, cognition/psychology, ergonomics, sociology, etc to design solutions that help them meet their goals • Test the validity of assumptions with regards to user behavior and effectiveness of designs in real world tests with actual users Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 5.
  “Traditional” UX Practices • Emphasize deliverables - wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, content inventories, mockups etc – and the need to polish them (which leads to long, detailed design cycles) • See the work as a solution that gets sold to stakeholders • See the (UX) designer as the hero in charge of finding solutions to design challenges and getting approval before development starts Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 6.
  Lean UX Practices • Less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed • Documents are stripped down to their bare components, providing the minimum amount of information necessary to get started on implementation • Work on hypotheses that are going to be tested, rather than solutions that are going to be sold • Focus on making the right product before making the product perfect (cf. Minimum Viable Product) • Short, iterative, low-fidelity design cycles • Collaboration, not command Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 7.
  (Lean UX) Process • Figure out who it’s for? • Interviews, personas, design target • What can the user do that wasn’t possible before? • Activity map, concept drawings, storyboards • What features does the user need for that? • Stickys, whiteboarding • User’s needs + features > How do they fit together? • Sketch it, (prototype it), then build it • “Fake it, then make it” Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 8.
  Why Agile orLean? • Startup innovates in a context of uncertainty. There’s insufficient evidence to confidently answer questions like will people want this kind of product? Will people buy it? What should it look like? What features should it have? • Because of the uncertainty, progress is measured by what we learn through experiments. Product success is found through repeated cycles of “build-measure-learn” • Work is organized into the smallest possible batch size and launched quickly -> Agile Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 9.
  Shared Goals Agile development and Lean UX share a few goals: • Shorten the time to market • Working software over comprehensive documentation • Collaboration over negotiation • Responding to change over following a plan Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 10.
  Challenges Company confidential. Donot copy or distribute.
• 11.
  How Can WeImprove Our Process? • The design work we do is often limited to on- the-go type of decisions • We allow only a limited amount of time for design • Because of that, it’s more difficult to develop, protect, and nurture patterns in our design • We struggle with approvals • We don’t have an established process that involves UXD, thus our scenario is not “going from traditional UX to lean”, but rather, “establishing our approach to UXD” Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 12.
  Problem vs. Solution “Focus on the problem. If you’re only excited about the solution, you’ll lose interest when your solution doesn’t fix the problem.” - Adil Wali, CTO of ModCloth Development focuses on the solution. UX design focuses on the problem. Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 13.
  Developer ≠ Designer • The people who make things pretty is a different breed than the people who make things work • A UX designer’s role is somewhere in the middle Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 14.
  Integrating Design intoOur Development Process The “Traditional” Way The Collaborative Way (Waterfall + Waterfall or Waterfall + Agile) (Lean UX + Agile Development) 1. Have a great idea 1. Have a great idea 2. Wireframe 2. Wireframe 3. Designer creates a static 3. Engage devs to build a mockup prototype 4. Static mockup is thrown 4. Play, tweak, rinse, repeat to devs to implement 5. Once UX is nailed have a designer polish to perfection Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 15.
  The Benefits • Designer’s time is not lost on features that aren’t shippable • Timelines will not be disrupted by unforeseen technical hurdles • Devs get to sit at the same table with designers • Both design and development cycles remain as short as possible Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.
• 16.
  Thank You Company confidential.Do not copy or distribute.