Design Collaboration
Rethinking the Role of Business Analysts in an Agile environment
Synergy of a Business Analyst and UX Designer
The Business Analyst (BA) and User Experience Designer (UX) are both responsible to meet the needs of users or organizations from a technological perspective. These two roles have skills and functions that may overlap and may use design thinking within their roles. Although a BA is often considered to have more of a business focus while an UX professional is considered to focus more on the end-user as well as the design. The reality is that the BA needs to consider the user needs along with the UX design process.
An Overview of BA & UX Roles on an individual perspective
The main difference between BA and UX is the direction from which they approach the problem space to elicit and gather requirements.
The emphasis for the BA is to understand the problem space from the business perspective. His/her role also includes translating concepts into actionable business requirements, defining business objectives, managing stakeholders and expectations around them.
This contrasts with UX who focuses on qualitative and quantitative user research to identify the motivations, needs, barriers, pain points, and context from the perspective of the user, making sure that user requirements are validated and understood.
The individual responsibilities of a BA and a UX Designer could be plotted in the below manner.
Bringing the BA & UX Designer Roles together
Today, BAs’ and UX designers may think they have completely unrelated roles, but that is a misconception that exists. However, as the two roles keep evolving in the agile environment, there is substantial amount of overlap that can be seen in the roles of a BA and a UX.
For example, the BA and UX both contribute to understanding the problem the business is expecting to solve. This extends to who will be affected and what part of the system needs to be changed in order to bring value to the business and the users. In order to create a clear picture on the requirements, the BA and UX would both use common tools and techniques based on research, products or facilitation like interviews, observation, personas or workshops.
In order to facilitate the designing process (which is a task shared between the two roles), they end up using common methods and techniques such as brainstorming and prototyping although each discipline excels in different aspects of the solution definition. The BA generally words it out, whereas UX tend to capture requirements more from the user’s perspective.
Considering these, certain organizations in the industry are in the process of merging both the Business Analyst and UX designer roles together so that the project or team could experience synergistic benefits out of it.
“Successful design projects require effective collaboration and effective conflict”
- Dan M. Brown
If we closely look at the above presented individual responsibilities of a BA and an UX designer, we can identify common overlaps of responsibilities. Therefore, the possibilities of merging both the two roles are being looked at from an agile team structure perspective.
“At least 70% of the individual responsibilities of a BA and UX Designer could be considered as shared responsibilities”
Even though we talk about collaborative roles, it might surely get us thinking as to how this could be done or in other words if there are any models to ensure that this synergy between the BA and a UX designer is practiced successfully.
At TIQRI, to ensure there is a smooth collaboration between these two roles we use the “Design Thinking Model”. This model ensures that the thinking patterns of a BA is aligned to the mindset of a UX Designer across the project. This is what has driven most of our projects towards success as we primarily focus on design driven development. Now let us have a quick overview on how we utilize this unique model within our organization.
What is Design Thinking?
What comes into your mind when you hear “Design Thinking”? You are probably thinking of a print you have seen on your shirt or a well-designed building.
Yes! That is what you need to be thinking of! Do you know how simple life gets when you initially visualize your plan? Likewise, we can apply this process to other aspects in our life.
Well, let me first define what design thinking is, Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.
After all, design thinking is all about iterative prototyping, where you test each idea to evaluate if it results in a solution that will address the customers problem.
Why do we follow the design thinking model?
In UX Design, it is crucial to develop and refine skills to understand and address rapid changes in users’ environments and behaviors.
Design teams use design thinking to tackle unknown problems because they can re-frame these in human-centric ways and focus on what is most important for users. Of all design processes, design thinking is almost certainly the best for “thinking outside the box”.
With this model, teams can do better UX Research, Prototyping and Usability Testing to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs. This model also helps us to perform the requirement elicitation and requirement gathering pertaining to a particular feature as we always opt out for design driven development in our projects.
This also means that, simply by applying this model throughout the UX and requirement gathering cycles, we have managed to witness the synergy between the two most crucial roles in an agile project which is BA and UX Designer. We have understood that the primary focus of these two roles relies on nothing but merely user expectations and user needs. Henceforth, we have realized that these two roles could be easily combined, given that we have a particular model in place. Hence, our only go to model was design thinking and which has helped us throughout our development projects so far due to the synergistic benefits we have been yielding out of it.
In order to ensure there is smooth collaboration between both the specified roles, we follow the five-step design thinking process which was introduced by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. We ensure that the idea of the below steps is understood by our project teams and we make sure the same is executed accordingly throughout the development processes in our projects.
We call this as the:
5 Step Design Thinking Creation Process
It is important to note that these steps do not have to be sequential and could be run in parallel or in an iterative way.
1. Empathize — Research Users’ Needs
The first stage of the design thinking process allows us to gain an empathetic understanding of the problem we are trying to solve, typically through user research.
In order to create desirable products and services, we need to understand who our users are? what they need?
What are their expectations in relation to the product we are designing? What challenges and pain-points do they face within this context?
During the empathize phase, we would spend time observing and engaging with real users (or people who represent your target group) — conducting interviews, seeing how they interact with an existing product, and generally paying attention to facial expressions and body language.
Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process as it allows us to set aside our own assumptions about the world and gain real insight into users and their needs.
As it could be seen, this stage of UX and requirement life cycles would be crucial for both the BA and the UX designer in a project.
2. Define — State Users’ Needs and Problems
In the Define stage, we accumulate the information we created and gathered during the Empathize stage.
We analyze our observations and synthesize them to define the core problems which we and our team have identified so far.
Once we have synthesized our findings, we would formulate what is known as a problem statement.
A problem statement — sometimes called a point of view (POV) statement — outlines the issue or challenge that you will seek to address.
Therefore, by the end of the define phase, we will have a clear problem statement which will guide us throughout the design process. This will form the basis of our ideas and potential solutions.
3. Ideate — Challenge Assumptions & Create Ideas
By this point, we will know who our target users are and what they want from our product. We also have a clear problem statement that we are hoping to solve.
Now it is time to come up with possible solutions.
Designers are ready to generate ideas as they reach the third stage of design thinking. The solid background of knowledge from the first two phases means you can start to “think outside the box”, look for alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement we have created.
4. Prototype — Start to Create Solutions
A prototype is essentially a scaled-down version of a product or feature — be it a simple paper model or a more interactive digital representation.
The aim of the prototyping stage is to turn our ideas into something tangible which can be tested on real users.
This is crucial in maintaining a user-centric approach, allowing us to gather feedback before we go ahead and develop the whole product. This ensures that the final design actually solves the user’s problem and is a delight to use!
5. Test — Try Your Solutions Out
Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified in the Prototype phase.
This is the final phase of the model but, in an iterative process such as design thinking, the results generated are often used to redefine one or more further problems. Designers can then choose to return to previous stages in the process to make further iterations, alterations and refinements to rule out alternative solutions.
If we closely look at this 5 step process that we follow as part of our design driven development concept, it could be noted that all of those 5 steps could be equally shared by both the BA and a UX Designer within a respective project as both those roles are primarily end user driven. This model has been the key methodology leading towards the success of certain global organizations such as Apple, Nike, Airbnb etc.
This simple model has led us to collaborate BA and UX designer roles into one single role in a much smoother manner despite certain differences.
Reasons for this collaboration and the benefits you get
Responsibilities are delegated to different disciplines for a reason. Each team has specialties that they handle, for example, you wouldn’t expect a business-oriented person to know how to create and adapt a project for desktop or mobile, just as you wouldn’t expect a UX designer to create business solutions for a project. They work in tandem so that the flow from phase to phase is seamless and all bases are covered with efficiency and accuracy. If teams were to work strictly individually, communication would become a problem as the languages of each discipline differ.
Modern application and website development projects typically require input from multiple roles across a business. With more complex projects, a BA that has a better understanding of the UX needs and development process is able to assist in keeping a project on-track by integrating business needs and user needs better. While some projects may not have time or resources for a full-time UX professional, having a BA that understands UX principles will enable these projects to better meet user needs, eliminating poor user experience problems, or costly and time consuming revisions.
What It All Means
The Conclusion
From idea to drawing board to production and execution, a project relies on all parties involved, each pulling their own weight so the project becomes a success. The importance of a BA is on the same level as having a great UX and UI design team. Effective collaboration creates a product worth investing time and energy into, and the BA is vital to this collaboration.
End of the day, the best apps will be those produced through close collaboration between the BA and the UX designer. This means taking the time to get both the BA and the UX designer on the same page with shared goals and clearly defined project scopes.
They will be happier, and you will, too!
I believe this article helped you to gain certain basic insights about the core concept of Design thinking !
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Atheek Razick is currently serving as a Project Lead & Business Consultant at TIQRI Corporation Limited. TIQRI is a global technology and development company with a focus on digitization and Innovative technologies. Prior to this , He also worked as a Lead Business Analyst at leading IT companies such as Accenture Plc and Virtusa Corporation.
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