UX and Agile
Recently I have been working to help progress a number of teams in terms of their UX capabilities. Since I am not a UX expert — my role largely depended on leaning on UX experts and pulling ideas and experiences together. While there are many dimensions to having great UX in products — organizational maturity is one dimension that is easily overlooked.
In order to communicate progress up the management chain I created a chart to try to distill some of the factors in achieving good UX. The chart I created shows what flavor of user stories a team would have (left part) given the UX capabilities and priorities of the team (center part). And the organizational maturity required to be successful given those priorities (right part).
It is, itself, an example of bad UX. I think I mentioned that I am not a UX designer!
Through the support of the UX folks that I leaned on, I learned that great UX requires lots of collaboration, testing and iteration. Combined with fail fast, using the trash can and short planning interation cycles it became clear that having real Agile capabilities are essential to be successful in executing against UX priorities.
More often than not, larger organizations have divisions and silos organized around individual products and markets. In these cases it is extremely hard to get to the final stage in the chart — where UX is designed around the whole experience of discovering the solution through evaluation, purchase, delivery, set up, use, support and then renewal. However the prior stage can be achieved within product groups — where the experience of setting up and using the product can be greatly enhanced. Here Agile teams need to include a PM organization that is fully engaged, a strong UX design capability and a customer base where interaction with the day-to-day users of the solutions is possible (not the guys that sales will drag along a PM to meet — those are usually the executives and the buyers — not the users).
When working to add great UX to your products and solutions, don’t just hire a UX resource. Also consider the state of your organization. Being succesful with UX needs more than just hiring a designer.