Webinar Agile Presentation V.1.0

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fhios Confidential and Proprietary 2009 www.fhios.com

User Experience Research CentrefhiosThe Media Centre3-8 Carburton Street London W1W 5AJ

www.fhios.comwww.fhiosinsights.com

Dr Martin Hicks, PhD, MSc, BSc (Hons.) Erdeniz Hassan MSc, BSc (Hons.)

12th November 2009

Webinar:

Usagility - Agile usability for rapid development

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• Established in 2002, now with around 300 clients

• Over 30 full time staff, who are highly qualified and commercially experienced

• Specialists in customer experience strategy, research and design

• Experience across all platforms including digital (e.g. web, intranets, mobile devices, PDA’s, i-TV, etc.), call centres, retail environments and physical products (e.g. laptops, printers, etc.)

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Presenters

ERDENIZ HASSAN, MSc, BSc (Hons)

Erdeniz holds a MSc in Human Centred Systems from City University. He has a wealth of knowledge of conducting user testing sessions and heuristic evaluations. His main interests include eye tracking this is evident within his thesis which is titled ‘Seeing the web the way we want them to: The benefits of eye tracking for web design.’ Erdeniz is a Senior research consultant at fhios.

Dr. MARTIN HICKS, Ph.D. MSc. BSc. (Hons.)

Martin holds a Ph.D. in Information Visualisation and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from the University of Nottingham. He gained a Masters degree in Ergonomics with HCI in 1999 from University College London. Before joining fhios, Martin worked as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Essex and as a Usability Specialist for Microsoft Research Cambridge. He has published widely and has gained experience in user interface design and usability studies based on mobile communication and web-based applications. Martin is a Senior research consultant at fhios.

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Agenda

What is agile usability?

Why agile usability?

– Benefits & issues

Case study: Agile usability for a financial services provider

Conclusions and recommendations

Questions

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Agile methods has roots in software engineering, a well known process, e.g. Extreme Programming (XP):

– Code implementation occurs in small increments & iterations

– XP teamwork, e.g., paired programming

– Small releases are delivered to the customer after each development cycle

– Maintain tight communication between stakeholders and programmers

Agile approach to interface design has been questioned (Memmel, 2006):

– Continuous changes to UI may conflict with users’ expectations & learnability - may lead to user dissatisfaction

– Evaluating small releases with stakeholders does not guarantee the system provides a consistent conceptual, navigational or content model

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Neilsen (2008) - problems with agile approach:

– Breaking tasks down into smaller user stories can obscure total user experience - features are developed inconsistently

As a solution:.

– Usability testing quickly and repeatedly

– ‘Parallel tracks’ allows usability work to be done one step ahead of development

– Low fidelity prototypes

Patton (2008) proposes best practice guidelines for adding UX to agile development, including:

– UX practitioners are part of customer/product team

– Parallel track development

– User validation

– Leverage user time for multiple activities

– Low fidelity prototyping

– Design facilitation

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Why agile usability? – Benefits & issues

Key benefits of integrating user experience in agile environments:

– Feedback & validation provided at earlier stage during development lifecycle

– Progression of products can be tracked

– Feedback can be directly fed into next iteration

– Modifications need not be restricted to iterations

– Reduced costs

But; for UX to be effective in agile environments, key factors should be addressed:

– A responsive design team able to work on design during iterations

– Ongoing communication between UX team and developers (co-located is best)

– Iterative testing of functions should not obscure the holistic user experience

– Overarching requirements should not be overlooked

– Project lifecycle should not be too far advanced

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Context

– Financial services provider redesigned sites for mortgage, savings and bank accounts products – required:

– 3 iterations of usability testing for each product

Objectives

– Understand the user experience of prototype sites with focus on:

– Navigation, content, ease of use, search, consistency, graphic design

Design

– Testing over 3 weeks, 45 participants split into 3 groups of 15

– Each group (of 15) reviewed one prototype site (mortgages, savings or bank accounts)

– Each group (of 15) further split into 3 groups of 5, each group (of 5) in iteration 1, 2 or 3

Activities

– Participant observation

– Talk aloud protocols

– Participant interviews and debriefing

– Questionnaire completion

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Overview of agile user testing and development iterations

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Testing priorities

– Priorities based on product complexity:

– Most complex first (mortgages, then savings and bank accounts)

– 1st and 2nd iterations of mortgages were tested, general findings fed into savings prototype

– Cycle repeated for savings and bank accounts

– Findings fed into final iterations of all 3 prototypes

Testing iterations process

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Summary reports

– In addition to debriefs, developers received UX summary reports following each test iteration:

– ‘Evolving’ reports presented findings from all iterations for each of the prototypes tested

– Helped validate the relevant usability issues exposed

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Task findings

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5.8 5.9 5.10

Annotated prototype

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Conclusions

– Ongoing debrief and reporting process helped developers to quickly identify outstanding or new issues with the prototypes

– 70% of usability issues were identified in the first round of iterative testing

– Number of issues diminished as prototypes were modified and refined following testing iterations

Agile approach enabled:

– Fast turnaround on subsequent testing iterations to work within ‘sprint’ and ‘scrum’

– Continuing user validation culture between UX consultants and developers

– Costs to be reduced as agile testing can support multiple projects on a smaller budget

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Agile usability – Points to consider

Agile testing can be beneficial in the right context, but need to consider:

– Reporting can be problematic if you set ambitions too high – need to be concise

– Project objectives should be explicit and signed off before project starts

– Leverage the opportunity to test changes to the prototype

– Close client contact is essential

– Discuss with developers the time needed to implement design changes between iterations

Benefit to clients is that agile testing enables development with high user acceptance on comparatively small budgets

Further research could identify the optimal iterations and time frame required to develop products with fewest usability issues

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Questions?

Martin Hicks: [email protected]

Erdeniz Hassan: [email protected]

For copies of presentation or further info on fhios services:

[email protected]

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Webinar Agile Presentation V.1.0