Presented at UX Scotland in Edinburgh on 6/8/2016. Many of us are thrust into an Agile Development world. How do we do our best UX in a process designed by developers? Where do we belong and how do we work within a Scrum team?
Alfresco TTL#157 - Troubleshooting Made Easy: Deciphering Alfresco mTLS Confi...
Great Agile in a UX World
1. GREAT UX IN AN
AGILE WORLD
Anthony Viviano
Mobile Interaction Designer
aviviano@bloomberg.com
@anthviv Copyright 2016 Bloomberg LP. All rights reserved.
3. ENTERPRISE ADVOCATE FOR LEAN UX
Educating: UX Team, Other interested parties, Executives
Teaching: Hosted training classes, lunch and learns
Selling: One-week experiment
3
4. ONE WEEK EXPERIMENT
Picked a thorny problem
Gathered a crack team
Locked ourselves in “war room” for a week
Hypothesized a solution, created low fi prototype and tested
4
6. LEFT ME WONDERING
Learnings were valuable - wrong team
My day job suffered – never really given the mandate to do
this fulltime
Co-location? Not really
6
9. OPPORTUNITIES
Validation: Difficult to get user validation
Design decisions: Wireframes are heavy deliverables and not
the end product
Planning: Shifting priorities within milestones
Feedback: Not always timely
Feature driven: Not stepping back and working toward user
goals and problems
9
10. SO WE TRIED
Small batch production – both design and dev
Early and frequent validation – internal and external
Collaborative design – design studio (tweaks) and more time
between dev and design
Focus on solving user problems – manifested in user stories
The build is the deliverable – weekly build reviews
Minimum viable design – just enough design to start building
10
12. WHAT ABOUT UX?
• Scrum is all about Product Owners, Developers and a
Scrum Master. What about design?
• We were told that from the perspective of Scrum, we were
Developers
• We learned that Product Owners prioritized, created and
maintained the roadmap and interfaced with users
12
13. AND FURTHER
How does design and development work within a single
sprint (often only two weeks)?
What about …
» UX Strategy
» Consistency
» User research?
13
14. WHAT WE LOVE ABOUT AGILE
Stories are focused on personas
Software is built prioritizing what the user values
Spikes can be used to do design explorations and validation
Collaboration with developers is efficient and could mean
lighter deliverables
14
15. WE RESEARCHED
Internal Agile teams
External Agile teams
Best practices in industry (papers and presentations)
» NN/g Paper: Agile Development that Incorporates User
Experience Practices
» White Paper: Scaling Agile @ Spotify
» UIE: Josh Seiden’s Presentation for Lean UX in the Enterprise
» Jeff Kelley’s Presentation: Adapting Agile Techniques to User
Experience in a non-Agile World
15
16. VALUED PRINCIPLES
Collaborate cross team, cross discipline and cross time
zones
Working Software is our deliverable
Seek out early customer (end user) validation of user stories
and continue to iterate
The team as a whole and each team member should have a
willingness to change
16
21. RECOMMENDED CHANGES TO SCRUM TRAINING
Customer – not just the stakeholder but think of the end user
Developers – better describe who is included
» UX Team Members
» Software Developers
» QA Testers
Definition of Done – include UX examples
Testing – include user testing
22. RECOMMENDED BEST PRACTICES TO UX
Discovery and delivery
Staggered sprints
Special considerations for UXaaS
How to employ Community of Practice methodology to
maintain consistency
22
30. RISKS OF STAGGERED SPRINT
Slight waterfall, risk of change
Unplanned work
Mitigating the risk
» If minor – do it
» If major – make a decision (prioritize with PM)
• Defer to a future sprint?
• Disrupt the current sprint and work on it
30
31. CAN WE DO IT ALL IN ONE SPRINT?
Tightening the gap reduces risk since things can change
Reduces need for documentation even further
Allows UX to contribute in new ways (QA?)
31
32. SINGLE SPRINT – PAIR UX/DEV
32
UX sits with Dev and gives
live direction
UX supports several
developers in this method
33. SINGLE SPRINT: BREAK DOWN STORIES
33
Task is small (an afternoon)
Dev can begin quickly
UX moves on to next small
task
UX contributes to QA at the
end of the sprint (or dev)
34. BENEFITS
Better working relationship between dev, product and design
since we’re all on the same team
Everyone speaks the same language since we’re tightly
integrated
Shared knowledge and shared ownership
Focus on end user increases product value, building the right
stuff
34
Thank Women in Tech – Esther Kundin and Melanie Rodriquez (also Janhavi and Jennifer Ahn)
Intro:
Mobile IX, BB Professional App
Been here about a year a half
My focus is on Research (RES/BRC) on Mobile
I also have been looking at how UX best fits into the over all Agile/Scrum framework
Before I talk through my own case study, wanted to give you a bit of history
2008 Lean Startup Movement – about 5 years ago. Lean UX
5 years ago, weekend immersion into Lean UX. Didn’t know what it was but I believed that there had to be better ways to work with Dev and Business .. Thought this would be an interesting start.
Lane Haley
Josh Seiden
Inspired me … continued to network in NYC, meetups, conferences – first Lean UX conference
Became an advocate to Lean UX I the Enterprise.
Worked at large financial firm – started to do these things.
One-week experiment – show how this process worked and was hoping that it would be widely adopted.
We worked through the week. Publicly posted progress. Walked execs through the room and talked through our walls.
We iterated and felt like we had a validated learning of how to solve the problem. – presented it.
We came up with a solution to the thorny problem, tested it, pivoted slightly and then documented our recommendation. It was a validated learning, but now what?
We did get some value from it though. As a team, we began creating lighter artifacts and validating earlier.
This is what inspired me, but I’ve now come to realize that this is flawed. Lean UX before Agile – no good.
I went back to my day job. What I learned influenced my work personally but it wasn’t the major shift that I had hoped for.
Then I started at Bloomberg
Lean UX was being practiced on the Research team
Since I didn’t start on a project right away, I asked if I could help out and maybe share some of what I knew. Began by interviewing team members.
Interviewed the team members and found these opportunities.
Made a recommendation to try these items.
Scrum training was offered to our UX team, and went for it.
You could say that Bloomberg was always lower case agile. But this was an effort to go upper case or practice Agile more like it was meant to be practiced.
As a few of took the scrum training, we felt like UX was being left out.
We also struggled to understand how our work would fit into a two week spring.
Don’t get me wrong. UX people do not hate agile. In fact, we love it and here’s why.
As we approach any problem, we begin by researching.
First we uncovered the value that our company hopes to get out of Scrum. This allowed us the leeway to make adjustments and not be pragmatic.
And these are some of things we learned.
We also learned that the ux process takes time and could be viewed as a bottleneck, so we needed to figure out a way for this not to happen.
Co-location is still an issue
So how did we overcome these obstacles and find a way to work within the Agile Scrum process?
We also made some recommendations to the Agile Curriculum Committee.
Briefly touch on these then transition to the two track dev concept.
Briefly introduce then go into breaking it down.
Discovery – walk through it and point out that the deliverable is validated learnings. This, however is not a good way to make quality software.
Delivery track – staggered sprints.
Without the validated learnings, this is useless.
Matrix to help us decide how we can cut through the process.
Creating and maintaining a Kanban
How Lean UX can help
Estimating and sprinting within your team
Well timed collaboration
Experimenting with this.
Also experimenting here. Too soon to tell since it’s not being done on everything.