Inside-out
versus
Outside-in
Can an Agile approach keep
the User Experience in focus?
There’s no turning back.
While adopting an Agile process might not always mean smooth sailing for project teams tasked with delivering a digital product, there seems to be little appetite for reverting to traditional (and more troublesome) methods such as Waterfall. Agile, however, brings with it a new set of challenges, particularly to user experience (UX) practitioners, and if it’s here to stay it’s worth exploring means of overcoming them.
Agile in a Nutshell
In essence, Agile is a time-boxed, iterative approach that builds a product incrementally from day one, rather than delivering the product in one go, towards the end of a project. Instead of treating research, analysis, design, coding and testing as discrete phases to be tackled one after the other, Agile treats them as related activities that should be undertaken continuously and collaboratively.
In terms of outcomes, Agile methods help:
- improve quality, because testing isn’t cut short if time and money run out,
- reduce risk, because it allows for quick adjustments to changing realities,
- increase visibility, because half the product is built when the project is halfway through, and
- satisfy users, because their feedback is integrated at points along the project, not in the final stages when cost of change is higher.
The most popular methodology, used in over 70% of Agile projects, is called Scrum — an adaptation of which we apply to our agency set-up at Reactive. Scrum works by breaking projects down into smaller chunks — known as user stories — and then delivering them in short (usually 2 week) cycles. These cycles — or sprints — are book-ended by intense planning and review sessions attended by the entire team, including the client-side Product Owner and Project Manager. In Scrum, the team self-organizes, co-locates and works as a co-ordinated unit pushing towards a common goal (much like a scrum in rugby union).
So, what’s the downside?
While Agile might not be right for every project, it is currently more favoured than its alternatives, enabling teams to act nimbly, projects to remain within budget and products to delight customers by virtue of regular testing. It is this last point in particular that suggests Agile is the ideal framework by which designers can craft meaningful, or at least pleasurable, user experiences (see Figure 2).
In practice though, Agile can still fall short of suitably supporting designers, and design, in this way.
Arguably, the chief obstacle is ideological. User experience strategy and design invokes the principles of human-centred design to tackle problems outside-in, zooming out to look holistically at the bigger picture before focusing on tasks.
Agile, on the other hand, born as an implementation strategy, tacitly assumes the holistic elements of the design are already known. It therefore approaches product development inside-out, where Scrum teams of front- and back-end developers might zoom-in on features and functionality from the get-go. In an agency setting where products are handed over to clients, there are other operational obstacles to consider:
Sprints don’t leave much breathing space for broader design thinking, forcing UX practitioners into tunnel vision and putting them under time pressure.
Lean concepts have also entered Agile frameworks — and talk of Minimum Viable Product, often a vehicle for validated learning in start-ups, forces design teams to aim for ‘just good enough’, or ‘usable’, at best. The compressed timescale of Agile projects and the in-built focus on delivery can, on occasion, force the abandonment of activities like user interviews or usability testing.
Even in projects that include a Sprint 0 (suggesting user-centred design is discrete as opposed to an ongoing concern), UX practitioners are required to make medium-term decisions based on limited understanding — and a Knowledge Gap emerges, (see Figure 2).
So, while it’s the best we’ve got, Agile should not be viewed as a golden ticket: if run poorly, it can easily give rise to a piecemeal, suboptimal user experience.
Upfront: a project depends on a UX designer most when he/she is still coming to grips with the business and its users (Knowledge Gap).
Tail-end: conversely, the designer is best informed just as the project enters its final sprints and developers, not designers, become the critical success factors (Efficacy Gap).
How can we best bridge these gaps within an Agile framework?
Time to improve the Agile experience
Agile is here to stay and digital customer experience is king (or close to it) — so how can Scrum and UX design get along?
Informed by our experiences at Reactive, from chats with industry colleagues, insights absorbed at conferences and tales collected from the interwebs, let’s take a look at some strategies that can better integrate UX into Agile and ultimately improve digital products.
Trust and Appreciation
Some developer-centric teams might have a culture that devalues UX, or believes the primary function of a designer is to ‘skin’. It is important to build team environments that foster trust and respect for everyone’s role — especially the User Experience functions at risk of being sidelined in an Agile environment.
Try to:
- hold in-depth introductions at project kick-off,
- provide information/training about what UX design involves, and
- share design iterations with, and seek contributions from team members.
Transparency and inclusivity gives developers a voice in design decision-making and ultimately breeds trust in the value of UX design.
1 Step Forward = 3 Sprints Back
Sprint 0 is clearly not enough time to (i) deep-dive into the subject matter, (ii) conduct and analyse user research, (iii) give life to personas and user journeys, (iv) audit content and devise an information architecture, and (v) establish an experience vision that the team can rely on. Of course, all that could take months. But in the spirit of Agile time-boxing, try 3 sprints for UX exploration, strategy and design before the team commences building the product from the ground up. During these cycles the developers can work on hosting and security, integrating APIs and other systems, setting up front-end scaffolding and getting involved in UX considerations.
UX is the Job of a Team
In a collaborative framework such as Agile, empathising with user needs and understanding business objectives isn’t a job for one resource but for the whole team. Ask developers to take notes during user interviews and stakeholder workshops and let visual designers sit in on usability testing — whatever you do, make sure you involve the team in UX design processes early and often. That way, everyone can increase their knowledge base and reduce their dependency on one UX resource, and effectively bridge the Knowledge and Efficacy Gaps referred to in Figure 3.
Budget Better, Budget More
While visual designers and developers might be working on part X of a product, the UX lead might have moved on to the next chunk (see Figure 4) — concepting and testing part Y. But it’s impossible for a UX designer to not get involved in the now, as their design makes its way into the browser, for example. All the while they’re also thinking about part Z and what’s upcoming. When sprint planning then, ensure more UX time is budgeted for collaborating (on part X), concepting (on part Y) and holistic design thinking (on part Z and the bigger picture) than you might predict.
Other tips
Co-locate Sit together, in a circular arrangement or such a way that you can see other team members’ screens (a front-end developer flanked by a UX designer and visual designer on either side has worked best for us).
Talk about MDP Minimum Viable Product is not what a project team, at least in an agency context, aims to inch towards each sprint. If you’re talking about minimum anything, make sure it’s the MDP — Minimum Desirable Product: that which has the smallest feature set, addresses user needs, creates the desired UX and has a feature or piece of functionality that delights the audience.
Bring Personas to Life Conduct persona familiarisation workshops with the team; hang up persona posters in the team’s work environment and refer to them when collaborating; use prioritized personas to groom the product backlog.
Some User Feedback is Better than None
When time and money gets tight, employ ‘discount’ UX methods such as heuristic evaluations, paper prototypes and hallway testing. Guerrilla research is recommended in every sprint, as it maintains a dialogue with users and reinforces the ‘build, measure, learn’ iterative process.
Better integrating UX design into an Agile framework isn’t just about optimizing the process –it’s about optimizing the product. Scrum, today’s methodology of choice, adopts a micro mentality: the project is broken into small chunks, work is done in time-boxed cycles, tasks get completed bit by bit. UX strategy and design, however, embraces a macro mentality: What problem(s) are we solving? What is the overall product/service strategy? Who represents our range of customers? What is their context of use? These opposing mindsets won’t shift, but they’ve got to co-exist. We have to be tactical, pro-active and agile (note the small ‘a’) in order to produce better outcomes — only then can an Agile approach hope to deliver the most meaningful user experiences.
