Agile Design Methods for Effective UX

Designing with Agile
Fast, Effective Methods that Work

@ANDERSRAMSAY / DESIGNINGWITHAGILE.COM #IASUMMIT / MAR 21 2012

Overview
- Intro (10m)
- Teams/Workshop Project (5m)
- Workshop (80m)
- Break ~10:30 (20m)
- Workshop (100m)
- Retrospective (~20m)


Who’s here?


Traditional Relay Race
- Team members run alone.
- Collaboration is not built into the game.

Agile Rugby Game
- Intensive and continuous collaboration is core to the game.
- Win the UX game by understanding how to move on an Agile playing ﬁeld.

Our top goal is to…but what’s
most important is that we…tho
what we really must do is to… But I
Thought…
Whaa…?

What
About…?

A Relay Race Meeting
- Not designed for collaboration.
- Slow debugging of issues, differences in understanding.


A Rugby Game Meeting Workshop
- An intensive passing game across roles/perspectives.
- Rapidly iterating toward shared understanding.

Learning to Play UX Rugby
Collaboration-centered design, a shift toward a facilitator skillset.
- Cardstorming
- Collaborative Chartering
- Design Studio
- Dotvoting
- Ideation Clearinghouse
- Paired Interviews
- Product Box
- Provisional Personas
- Speed Boat
- Story Mapping
and many more...


An Agile UX Project Pattern

ly
ken
i sta
n m rong
fte
Io he
w
er t ause…
ord bec
I rt,an
pa w t us
ers to
feel c
onfide
their c nt abo
ut
hoice…

Capture
Explore Product Designing
Problems,
Solutions Road Map while Building
Goals


An intensive passing game

Learn

From Convo Make
to Code

Test


Teams
- 4-6 per team.
- 1 product owner


Our Sample Project
A Donator App for a Children’s Charity
Providing education and shelter for abandoned
and orphaned children around the world.
(a real charity I’ve worked with)


Business Goals
- Convince visitors to make a donation.
- Persuade visitors to donate a little more than intended.
- Make visitors feel conﬁdent the donation is going
toward actual cause.
- Motivate visitors to tell others to donate.

Target Audience: You
(for workshop purposes only)


Paired Interviews
- Applying pairing to user research.
- Quickly capture data from many users.

Paired Interviews
- Be sure each person has a chance
to interview the other.
- Capture each key point on a
separate sticky.
- Capture as many stickies as
possible.

@ANDERSRAMSAY DESIGNINGWITHAGILE.COM #IASUMMIT MAR 21 2012

Barb, 54
* Has been proofing manuscripts w/ red pen for
almost 30 years and has no interest in doing it any
other way.
* Knows MS Word inside and out: “I help others in
the office use it.”
* Still struggles with using email.

* Bristles at being told she is not computer literate:
“I stay in touch with my grandkids using Facebook,
so there.”

Provisional Personas
- Continue to evolve with our understanding of our users.
- Team participation facilitates user empathy.

Experience Mapping
- Uncover and prioritize user needs and desires.
- Based on the “Speed Boat” Innovation Game.

X-Mapping Pattern
1. Establish Goals/Focus.
2. Generate raw materials (eg with
Cardstorming)
3. Self-organized mapping. (Can do
in pairs.)
4. Circle and title item clusters.
5. Prioritize (eg w/Dot-Voting)


Dot-voting
- Quickly captures trending
opinions.
- 3-5 dots per participant.
- Use markers or stickie dots.
- Voters can distribute dots any
way they want.
- Everyone votes at once.



ly
ken
i sta
n m rong
fte
Io he
w
er t ause…
ord bec
I rt,an
pa w t us
ers to
feel c
onfide
their c nt abo
ut
hoice…

Capture Explore
Problems,
Solutions
Goals


Design Studio
- Tapping into the whole team’s knowledge and imagination.
- Can be used for research or actual design.
- Three variants: Divergent, Convergent, Ad-Hoc

A Design Studio Pattern

Focus/ Warmup/ Sketching
Boundaries Raw Materials Timebox Critique


Cardstorming
- 3-5 minute timebox.
- Warms up brain and hands.
- Each participant writes as many
features they can think of on
separate stickies.
- Becomes a feature palette for
sketching.


Sketching Timebox
- 5m timebox.
- Everyone sketches.
- No rules.
- If conducting with general
stakeholders, clarify that this is
research, not design.
- If conducting with the internal
team, the UI concepts can be the
basis for the actual design.


Critique
- 2m round-robin, then open crit.
- Take careful notes, attach to the
respective sketches.
- Look for and work to resolve
vision differences.
- (Optional) Dot-vote to uncover
trending solutions.



ly
ken
i sta
n m rong
fte
Io he
w
er t ause…
ord bec
I rt,an
pa w t us
ers to
feel c
onfide
their c nt abo
ut
hoice…

Capture Product
Explore
Problems,
Solutions Road Map
Goals


Uncovering a Product Road Map

UI Exploration

Storymapping
Product
Road Map

Estimating


Product Road Map and MVP
- Designing releases, uncovering a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Many ways to slice and dice.
- First release often hardest.

MVP Strategies
- Painkiller
Fastest/Cheapest way to remove
user pain.
- Fa$t Money
Fastest path to revenue.
- Go Ugly Early
Screw the UX, just make it work.
- Fake It ‘til You Make It
Create fake features to capture
metrics and validate your idea.
There is no one right way.


Storymapping
Attract Convert Transact Upsell


The thinnest horizontal slice
Attract Convert Transact Upsell

R1


Storymapping and UI...
Directory Purchasing Fulfillment Support

How do they map to
Do we have all the user interface?
the all the stories?

Are they even
the right stories?


UX Stories vs Dev Stories...
I often order the wrong As an auto sales rep, I
part, because the part want to search for parts
numbering system is visually, so I can be sure
confusing. It wastes time I’m ordering the right part.
and makes me look stupid
in front of customers!

“Tell me about your “Tell me what to build.”
problem or goal.” A Dev Story. Can be estimated,
sized, tested.
A UX Story. Often emotional, not
easily estimable, testable, etc.


Those who need a document should participate in creating it.
—Ancient Agile Proverb


UX Storymapping
1.Lay out a complete user ﬂow.
2.Create a story map backbone.
3.Explore the thinnest horizontal
UI slice. (What features can be
simpler/removed for the MVP
Missing features? Add a
sticky.)
4.Work with the “Dev” on
extracting cards from the UI to
add to the storymap.


UX Storymapping Example
Attract Transact Upsell Share

Static Landing Process
Page credit card
payments

“Donator- Make payment
meter” via SMS


The UX of Estimating
- Be sure estimate is informed by
UI Exploration.
- Be present, prepared to speak up
and negotiate.
- Understand the estimation units
(e.g. points)

@ANDERSRAMSAY DESIGNINGWITHAGILE.COM #IASUMMIT MAR 21 2012 Photo: ryanendres.blogspot.com


ly
ken
i sta
n m rong
fte
Io he
w
er t ause…
ord bec
I rt,an
pa w t us
ers to
feel c
onfide
their c nt abo
ut
hoice…

Capture Designing
Explore Product
Problems,
Solutions Road Map while Building
Goals


Designing while Building

- Supporting the current sprint
- Preparing for the next sprint
- Learning from the previous
sprint.
- More about logistics than design.


Automating Collaboration with Cadences
- Apply Agile approach to planning to ensure that whole team is designing together.
- Can also be applied to ﬁeld research, usability testing and other UX activities.


Micro-Sprints
- Self-organize into UX/”Dev”/PO
- Create paper prototypes that
allow for completing the
donation process.
- I’ll initiate “User Fridays”
cadences.
- Ask users how much they’d be
willing to donate and track your
donation and upsell totals.


Showcase


Done vs Validated
Done - a tool for helping teams make decisions and move forward.
Can we decide that this task is done and move on to the next thing?

Validated - a measurement of design value.
Was this idea as good as we thought it was?


Retrospective
- Enabling continual learning and improvement.
- Start with results from the last retrospective.
- What worked? Didn’t work? What didn’t make sense?


Thanks!
@andersramsay
andersramsay.com
designingwithagile.com


Agile Design Methods for Effective UX

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (14)

Similar to Agile Design Methods for Effective UX

Similar to Agile Design Methods for Effective UX (20)

More from Anders Ramsay

More from Anders Ramsay (8)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Agile Design Methods for Effective UX