Agile UX, Yes We Can!

Prepared by: Alla Zollers – Senior Experience Designer

March 30, 2010

Agile UX, Yes We Can!

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Part 1: The Educational Bit

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What does it mean to “be agile”?

• Agile is not a specific method you can follow. No team practices the Agile method. There is no such thing.

• Agile is philosophy, a set of values and principles, a mindset.

•  To “be agile”, you need to put the agile values and principles into practice.

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Source: The Art of Agile Development by Shore and Warden

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(Very Brief) History of Agile Principles and Practices

Inspired by Japanese industry and specifically Toyota’s Lean Thinking, agile evolved from the development community in the mid-90’s as a reaction to “heavyweight” methods.

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At the core, I believe Agile Methodologists are really about "mushy” stuff, about delivering good products to customers by operating in an environment that does more than talk about ‘people as our most important asset’ but actually ‘acts’ as if people were the most important, and lose the word ‘asset’

“

”

Source: The Agile Manifesto

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(Very Brief) History of Agile Principles and Practices

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• Work at a sustainable pace

• Self-organize

• Work cross-functionally as a team

• Recognize that we will never know everything upfront, and be flexible enough to adapt and change course when new information surfaces

• Realize business value quicker by decreasing the time to market

• Create higher quality work

• Work in a way that makes sense for the types of products being created in today’s market

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Agile Values

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Translation: Great products come from great teams

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Translation: Get to high-functional fidelity quickly. Provide just enough documentation to produce great work.

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

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Agile Values

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• Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation

Translation: Involve end-users, decision makers, and stakeholders throughout the entire process

• Responding to change over following a plan

Translation: Existing in a mindset that is always ready for change

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Agile Values

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Although unwritten, one of the major agile values is continuous improvement, at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

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Agile Practices

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• A method, or process, is a way of working. Whenever you do something, you are following a process.

• Agile methods are processes that support the agile philosophy. Examples include Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum.


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A Few Key Agile Practices

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• Co-Location / Pairing

• Story Creation

• Real Customer Involvement

• Stand-Up Meetings

• Continuous Testing

• Retrospectives

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Agile Practice – Co-Location/ Pairing

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Principle: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools & continuous improvement

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Agile Practice – Story Creation

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Principles: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools & Working software over comprehensive documentation

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Agile Practice – Real Customer Involvement

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Principle: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

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Agile Practice – Stand-Up Meetings

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Principles: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools & Responding to change over following a plan

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Agile Practice – Continuous Testing

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Principles: Working software over comprehensive documentation & Responding to change over following a plan

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Agile Practice – Retrospectives

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Principle: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools & continuous improvement

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Lifecycles

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Plan Analysis Design Code Test Deploy

Waterfall

3- 24 months, Features 1-30

Agile

Plan

Analysis

Design

Code

Test

Deploy Plan

Analysis

Design

Code

Test

Deploy

1 - 3 months Features 1-15

1 - 3 months Features 15-30

$

$

$


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Value Propositions

• Higher productivity, lower cost

• Improved employee engagement, and job satisfaction

• Faster time to market

• Higher quality

• Improved stakeholder satisfaction

• What we have been doing no longer works

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Main Value Proposition

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Design

In Waterfall the designer/developer wall creates an “us” vs “them” mindset

In Agile, everyone works as a team

Development

Build

Design

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Challenges with Agile

• Agile is not a silver bullet

• Few tried and tested agile practices for UX designer

• Unclear role of UX in process

• Requirements gathering process is not defined

• Setting up a successful implementation of agile practices is difficult

• Agile practices are pervasive throughout the entire organization

• Organization upheaval and change

• Any transition to agile must come both from top-down and bottom-up

• Better for refining not defining

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Can We Change Our Mindset to be Agile?

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Yes We Can!

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Part 2: The Practical Bit

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Agile UX (AUX)

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The question is not “how do you fit UX into Agile”, its “how do you fit Agile into UX”

•  There is an assumption that the standard set of UX activities and outputs should simply slot into agile development practices unchanged

•  Lets flip the question and ask what would a UX Design project look like if you were following Agile principals.

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The Role of UX

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• UX practitioners are most successful in the customer role on an agile team. The customer defines the software, and determine what stakeholders find valuable.

• The customers most important job is release planning which includes

• Evangelize product vision

• Identify features and stories

• Group features into small, frequent releases

• Manage risk

• Create an achievable plan

• Ratio: 2 customers per 3 developers

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Agile UX – Beginning of Project

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UX Inception Workshops

UX Prototype Iteration 1



Initial Discovery Research

Customer journey sketch boards

Interaction design & wireframes

Context, Customer, Scenarios

Interactive Prototype Development

Usability Test Usability Test Usability Test Usability Test Showcase Showcase

Prioritize

Design analysis

UX Prototype

Usability Test

Design analysis

UX Prototype

Usability Test

Design analysis

UX Prototype

Usability Test

Discovery (1-2 Weeks) Iteration 0 (2-4 Weeks)

UX Prototype Stories

Scoping

Showcase Showcase

Ongoing Discovery Research

Time boxed analysis, development and user testing cycles focusing on collaboration, testing and fast feedback

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Objection

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Agile methods do not provide enough time for UX practitioners to conduct necessary research and discovery

Agile does not provide as much time upfront to conduct research and discovery, this is an ongoing activity

Answer

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The ‘Just-Enough’ Mindset

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Plan

Analysis

Design

Code

Test

Deploy Plan

Analysis

Design

Code

Test

Deploy

Release 1 Release 2

Conduct enough research to start designing for release 1, continue to research during iterations

Conduct enough research to start designing for release 2, continue to research during iterations

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Agile UX – Middle of a Project

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UX

Dev

iterating the UX design and Dev

implementation tracks simultaneously

Short iterative design steps and regular

testing cycles, ensuring we craft UX in a

collaborative manner

Source: Adapting Usability Investigation for Agile User Centered Design by Sy (2007)

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Objection

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If I break up my design into pieces that can be fit into an iteration, it is difficult for me to picture the holistic system

Sketch your initial understanding of the holistic system, then begin to dive deep into the parts of the system that are prioritized

Answer

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Think Holistically, Work Incrementally

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Next Iteration Entire System

Wireframe or Prototype Sketches Post-It Notes or Storyboards

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Objection

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Some designs are too complex to fit within one iteration

Break large designs into small, cycle-size pieces called design chunks that incrementally add elements to the overall design over several iterations

Answer

Source: Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User Centered Design by Sy (2007)

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Objection

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There is not enough time to conduct formative usability testing and then create a usability report.

Employ light-weight usability techniques, and progressively engage in defining test protocols and recruitment.

Answer

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Objection

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Working software over comprehensive documentation means no more wireframes or mockups

Use the tools that will help you produce good work

Answer

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Can We Adopt Our Practices to be Agile?

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Yes We Can!

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Part 3: The Emotional Bit

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Resistance to Agile

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• Like the status quo

• I like who I work with

• I like the power and prestige that comes with my current role

• This is the way I was trained to do it and the only way I know how

• I don’t like change of any sort

• I don’t want to start another change initiative because they always fail anyway

• Don’t like Agile Practices

• I think agile is a fad and we’ll just have to switch back in three years

• Agile is a bad idea for our products

• I got into the field so that I could put on headphones on and not talk to people

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Can We Be Honest With Ourselves?

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Yes We Can!

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Can We Be Successful with Agile?

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Yes We Can!

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Can We Gain Benefits from Agile?

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Yes We Can!

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Agile UX, Yes We Can!

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