Jim Carlsen-Landy Presentation

@JimCL42 @GoAgileCamp #AgileCamp
Defeating Babel
4 Strategies for Better Design Communication in Agile
Jim Carlsen-Landy
User Experience Architect
ARGO Data Resource Corp.
jim.carlsenlandy@gmail.com
AgileCamp Dallas 2015
#AgileCamp
@goAgileCamp
@JimCL42

What’s this about?
Is
 intro to or critique of Agile
 how to reduce or eliminate
design
 details of specific design or
coding methods
 all the answers
 the only answer
Is
 working better across
functional roles
 applicable to developers,
designers, product owners,
QA, and managers
 better communication about
design and development
during the process

What’s this about?
Is
 intro to or critique of Agile
 how to reduce or eliminate
design
 details of specific design or
coding methods
 all the answers
 the only answer
Is
 working better across
functional roles
 applicable to developers,
designers, product owners,
QA, and managers
 better communication about
design and development
during the process
The Law of Two Feet:
If this isn’t what you expected, you can leave now or at any time.
Please be considerate of other attendees and leave quietly,
without stepping on their toes or spilling your water on them.

For the attention span impaired
Drive priority discussions around value
Speak a shared language of Agile development
Show the possibilities, don’t debate principles
Tailor artifacts to meet your teams’ needs

Who am I? How did I get here?

…and you are?
 Developer
 Designer
 Product Owner
 Scrum Master
 Quality Engineer
 Product Manager
 Team Manager
 Project Manager
You are part of a product team.
Your actions and your decisions affect your product.
Therefore you are a product designer.

Why is communication a problem?
 Design is different from development
 Years of waterfall thinking have created silos
 By-the-book Agile is very development-centric
 Our teams and leaders have different concerns
 Humans crawl into their comfort zone under pressure
 Professionals use the secret language of their craft to reinforce
their authority and value

The secret to better communication
It depends.
Every team,
every project, and
every organization
is different.

Four things you can do
Drive priority discussions around value
Speak a shared language of Agile development
Show the possibilities, don’t debate principles
Tailor artifacts to meet your teams’ needs

Agile value

Agile value
Our highest priority is to satisfy the
customer through early and continuous
delivery of valuable software.

Value = Priority = What gets done
Q: Who decides priority in your sprints?
A: Your product owner.
POs and Designers should be BFFs.
Reach a mutual understanding
of the value of a great user experience.

Different concerns
Developer
• Efficient
• Maintainable
• Implementable
Designer
• Usable
• Modern
• Branded
Product
Owner
• Customer needs
• Utilitarian
• Business ROI

Different concerns, one goal
Developer
• Efficient
• Maintainable
• Implementable
Designer
• Usable
• Modern
• Branded
Product
Owner
• Customer needs
• Utilitarian
• Business ROI
DELIVE
R
VALUE

Usability adds value (the simple version)
 A feature that cannot be used prevents the user
from performing the intended task.
 If the user is unable to perform the intended task,
that feature delivers less (or zero) value.
 An attribute of the product that interferes with or
reduces the value delivered is a defect.
Therefore, an unusable feature is a defect.
QED

For your users
 Efficiency, accuracy, consistency
 Trust & acceptance
 Better tolerance for bugs
 Stay competitive and profitable
User-centered design adds value

For your users
 Efficiency, accuracy, consistency
 Trust & acceptance
 Better tolerance for bugs
 Stay competitive and profitable
User-centered design adds value
For your business
 Reduced support calls
 Reduced training costs
 Fewer product returns and more
renewals
 Differentiate in the market
 Avoid lawsuits

User-centered design reduces risk
Paul Sherman, “Decision Insurance: Iterative Prototyping to Reduce Business Risk”

Presentation adds value
Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations, 1997

Features aren’t enough anymore
Sunday Monday
Thanks, Jeremy Johnson!

When difficulty > value
What you’re asking for is risky / expensive / takes too long.
Okay, we won’t do that at all.

When difficulty > value
What you’re asking for is risky / expensive / takes too long.
I see.
Does this lower cost alternative meet your needs?
No? Then let’s negotiate something that does.

Don’t take my word for it
 Autodesk: “experience design contributes 36% to 40% to
motivating users to recommend our product.”
 That’s NPS for you marketing folks in the room
 Medallia: compared to users who had the worst experiences,
users who had the best experiences:
spent 2.4x as much and renewed 6x as often

 Autodesk: “experience design contributes 36% to 40% to
motivating users to recommend our product.”
 That’s NPS for you marketing folks in the room
 Medallia: compared to users who had the worst experiences,
users who had the best experiences:
spent 2.4x as much and renewed 6x as often
Peter Kriss
Harvard Business Review blog
1 Aug 2014
It’s time to stop the philosophical debate about
whether investing in the experience of your
customers is the right business decision. This
isn’t a question of beliefs, it’s a question about
the behavior of your customers.

Design Management Institute, March 10, 2014

The value of happiness
@SimonCockayne
“Forget velocity, measure value”
Ask your customers:
“How happy does backlog item x make you?”
Super-happy (score 9-10) – You love the backlog item.
Ok (score 7-8) – You are satisfied.
Unhappy (score 0-6) – You are unhappy (or miserable) about
the backlog item.

The value of happiness
@SimonCockayne
“Forget velocity, measure value”

Perspectives on value
Adam Polansky, “Spread It, Split It & Stack It – 3 Methods for Qualifying Content”, Big Design 2010

Games for getting to value
www.innovationgames.com

Summing up value

UX is in there
Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility. Simplicity – the art of maximizing the
amount of work not done – is essential.

Being present in an Agile world

Design stories, dev stories
Design stories Development stories

Build a runway:
Research & discovery
Epic-level design (e.g. storyboards)
Pre-release usability testing

Don’t accumulate UX debt:
Generic “do GUI” in a separate user story
“Apply the look&feel to finished screens”
UX defects are “cosmetic” (UX debt)

Development storiesDesign stories

Development stories
Design stories

Project stories

Building a teapot
As a user I need a teapot so that I can make tea.

Building a teapot
As a user I need a teapot so that I can make tea.
a tea drinker

Building a teapot
As a user I need a teapot so that I can make tea and
enjoy a relaxing hot beverage.
a tea drinker
Jane Souchong

Building a teapot
As a user I need a teapot so that I can make tea and
enjoy a relaxing hot beverage.
a tea drinker
Jane Souchong needs
she
“User Stories Don’t Help Users: Introducing Persona Stories”, William Hudson, ACM Interactions magazine, issue XX.6
Nov/Dec 2013

Building a teapot
Jane Souchong needs a teapot so she can make tea
and enjoy a relaxing hot beverage.

Building a teapot
Acceptance criteria:

Building a teapot
Holds water
Can be heated to boiling without breaking
Holds tea so it can steep in boiling water
Handle to lift the teapot
Spout to pour out the tea
Washable
Attractive on my kitchen shelf
… and so on

Make users and usability explicit
Prototyping and design validation for every product increment
Definition of Done includes “UX reviewed” and “Usability tested”
“Reviewed and approved by UX” in acceptance criteria (add a task!)
“Usability tested” in acceptance criteria (add a task!)
“Usable” in acceptance criteria
Usability test stories in every sprint
Usability test stories in every release backlog
Persona names in user stories (“Jane Souchong needs…”, not “As a user…”)

Even more Agile UX hooks
 Refactoring
 Shippable increments
 No unnecessary documentation
 Simple design

Prototype, prototype, prototype
Q: What’s the right fidelity of
prototype?
A: Any fidelity is better than none.

 Paper
 Wizard of Oz
 PowerPoint, Keynote
 InDesign, Axure, InVision
 Okay, HTML/javascript are good for prototyping, too

 Paper
 Wizard of Oz
 PowerPoint, Keynote
 InDesign, Axure, InVision
 Okay, HTML/javascript are good for prototyping, too
 But keep it cheap, light, and fast
Can I throw this away without hesitation?

Obligatory Controversial Content Ahead

Q: Should designers code their own
prototypes?

prototypes?
A: If you can, go ahead.
BUT
Don’t limit your designs to what YOU
can build.
Find a developer to pair with – they’re
better at it.

prototypes?
Jesse Weaver
“We Don’t Need More Designers Who Can Code”
Medium RE:Write, Dec 2014

Prototyping is cheap, not free
 Prototypes save time & money
 Experiments save time & money
 Plan prototypes into the sprint
 Do NOT rely on skunkworks
 Do NOT rely on the team’s willingness to “do the
right thing” off the clock

Spike it out
Developers
 If you don’t know
something, spike it
 If an approach seems risky,
spike it
 If someone thinks another
way is better, spike both

Spike it out = Do. The. Research.
Developers
something, spike it
 If an approach seems risky,
spike it
way is better, spike both
Designers
something, research it
 If an approach seems
uncertain, research it
way is better, research both
Note: Research = USER research

Research is expensive, right?
Wrong. REALLY wrong.
 Guerrilla user research
 Guerrilla usability testing
 5-second tests
 Hallway tests
 Group sessions
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Research is expensive, right?
Wrong. REALLY wrong.
 Guerrilla user research
 Guerrilla usability testing
 5-second tests
 Hallway tests
 Group sessions
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Less >> Zero
 Stakeholder interviews
 Repurpose existing data
 Fewer participants
 Remote / unmoderated
 No lab, no recordings

One more thing about research
Q: What’s the most expensive mistake
you can make in a product?
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

One more thing about research
Q: What’s the most expensive mistake
you can make in a product?
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
A: Building a product that nobody wants.
Do. The. Research.

Show design and code often
It’s never done, so don’t hang on to it
 Show in-work design
 in sprint demos
 to other designers
 to your developers
(they’ll tell you if it’s insane)
 Show in-work code
 in pairing sessions
 to other developers
 to your designers
(they’ll tell you if it’s off-target)

Agile Manifesto sez

Lean UX sez
You are in the problem-solving business, and you
don’t solve problems with design documentation.
You solve them with elegant, efficient and
sophisticated software.
Jeff Gothelf
“Getting out of the deliverables business”
Smashing Magazine, March 2011

What are the right deliverables?
It depends.

What does your team need?
Fidelity&Detail
Cost
Co-construction
Conversations & notes
Scenarios / Use Cases
Storyboards
Wireframes
Low-fi mockups
Hi-fi mockups
Pixel-perfect comps
Annotated static mockups
Interactive mockups
Clickable wireframes

It depends.
 How mature is the design team?
 How mature is the dev team?
 How mature is the relationship of dev, UX, and PO?
 What is the least fidelity that communicates sufficiently?

It will change.
This is a wonderful kind of intepersonal magic.
Start somewhere in the middle,
and see which way you need to adjust.
Observe during each sprint.
Adjust again.
And again.

Wireframe scenarios

Your turn
www.linkedin.com/in/jimcl
@JimCL42

If you remember only one thing
Communicating design in an Agile team
is about conveying value,
not handing off artifacts.
So…
Know where UX adds value,
equip yourself to communicate it clearly, and
be prepared to talk about it a LOT.
1.
www.linkedin.com/in/jimcl
@JimCL42

Jim Carlsen-Landy Presentation

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