Mismatch of UX Design and the Agile way of working
If you are working as a UX Designer, you probably have something to do with scrum teams since Agile is hot. More and more companies are turning their way of working into the one stated in the Agile Manifesto. This is (in most cases) a great way to start building products in short iterations and provide value to the users. An excellent opportunity, but for a UX designer, it can be challenging to work with these iterations and short-term backlogs.
Since I’m working within scrum teams for a few years now, I experienced lots of different adoptions of Agile and maybe even more difficulties, which make your life as a UX Designer sometimes hard.
The layers of UX
Before diving into the difficulties, let’s first take some time for the different layers of UX within an Agile oriented organization. In most Agile organizations, you can divide UX work into three segments.
- The first layer is most focused on the short-term activities. You basically have to ensure that the scrum team can do their work by providing them with designs that fit the user stories for their upcoming sprint. Generally, you are designing new screens or features.
- The second layer is more focused on the long-term, for example coming quarter or six months. As UX Designer, you are mostly working on getting the Epics clear, researching new features/ideas and creating some high over concepts. There is more room for a broader perspective than the specific product. In my opinion, this layer is a combination of what Jeff Gothelf calls ‘Lean UX’ and ‘Design Thinking’ in his book Lean UX.
- Finally, the third layer is sometimes done by you as UX Designer within the scrum teams but can also be done by, e.g. a lead designer or a high over UX team. This entirely depends on the organization’s structure. In most cases, this layer is all about organization-wide activities like developing a design system, design principles or helping the organization to adopt design thinking.
Difficulties of working in an Agile environment
Due to these layers, there are several difficulties within the UX field.
Expecting fulltime commitment
Firstly, Agile teams expect fulltime commitment, while you also have to work on the second and third layers of UX. It’s therefore nearly impossible to be fulltime committed, which results in a mismatch between expectations and reality.
Late involvement in the process
The second issue is that UX is quite often seen as a part of the IT department, which is often hierarchical true. However, UX designers cannot excel when they can only work on getting user stories ready for the next sprint. Since user experience is everything your company is doing, a lot of decisions are made before you, as a user experience designer, get involved. For example, the decision to build a specific app or feature within an app. This can be the right decision, but is this the best way to solve the problem?
Moreover, time for research is, by all means, quite scarce. Mainly due to a small backlog and thus last-minute new user stories which should be ready for the next sprint.
Another issue related to the lack of time is the fact that creative work needs time. It is impossible to explore different solutions in a short period. Sometimes ideas just need time to let them pop. Due to late involvement, it often happens that you, as a UX designer, have to design a feature in only a few days. So, hurry up, no time for exploration, inspiration and, ideation. Just come up with a suitable problem solution.
MVP’s and the lack of further improvement
While working within a scrum team, you’ll often get the question if something can be designed a bit easier. At least more comfortable to build. The MVP is the holy grail, which is useful if you have enough time to further iterate on the feature. Unfortunately, quite often, I experience the lack of further improvements since development teams get lots of new stories and epics on their backlog. This makes that further improvements on the MVP aren’t prepared or made only after a year or so. The result, a ‘just good enough’ product, but not something the users really like.
Lack of long-term product vision
While building in short iterations, the product vision is essential. It helps in deciding if a feature is valuable for the product. But also, as a guideline while designing new features. After all, they have to fit in the future picture of the product.
I know it is challenging to create a clear vision, and maybe that’s the reason it is often missing for a product. Although, perhaps another problem appears when organizations split IT from Business and expect that ‘The Business’ creates a vision, which has to be executed by the IT department. In most cases, the development teams aren’t involved in the creation of the vision statement. Since they have to build a product according to the vision, they have to feel it to create the best possible outcome. Moreover, there is a communication leak when the business has to communicate the concept to the product owner. In the end, they have to share the vision with the scrum team. Each step in de communication flow results in losing a bit of clearness.
What works…
While working with different scrum teams, I decided to overcome the difficulties mentioned above by trying several things. The result is a list of suggestions that makes your life as a UX designer within an Agile environment a bit easier…
- Invest in bonding with the scrum team, so always join the scrum events like the retrospectives, sprint demos, etc. This helps in becoming an actual team member.
- Involve the scrum team in the design process. Developers, testers, product owners, etc. often have good ideas on how to solve a specific problem since they know the product and its implications by heart. Moreover, by involving them in the design process, you’ll learn them more about how to work towards the right problem solution with users in mind, and they feel ownership over the designs.
- Ensure you are pro-active in suggesting for user research and/or co-creation with users. Most people within the organization don’t have experience with these essential tools and, therefore, forget to apply them.
- Make time to work on the second and third layers of organizational activities (e.g. a design system). If you are part of the scrum team, you should be aware that those important activities often get less priority due to the expectation of fulltime commitment for the team. So, don’t forget to make clear why this time investment is essential for the organization and the team.
- Invest in socializing with your colleagues on the business side of the organization, so they also know you exist. This will help in earlier involvement in processes and gives you an excellent opportunity to teach the businesspeople about the importance of, for example, user research and design thinking.
- If you think the product vision isn’t clear, propose a vision workshop, so the whole team can work on the concept and gets on the same page.
In my experience, the above suggestions work. However, be aware of the fact that each organization and each team is different, so they all need a different approach.
Let’s design the best UX way of working in an Agile environment.
