New to Lean UX and Agile — a designers perspective
When I started out, digital design was relatively new. I studied graphic design and in 2000 got my first job, which just happened to be at a digital agency. In those days screen design was actually very much like print design and so my transition over to digital was pretty easy. Over the years I have worked in various communication and marketing agencies, all with strong creative histories and who use Waterfall style processes.
Like the name suggests, Waterfall is a linear process. As a designer you would start with a brief and some insights from which you create amazing concepts. The client loves one of them so you iterate that until both you and the client are happy.
Next you create stunning finished Photoshop files of the entire site, which are packaged up and sent onto the development team. The developers code it; it’s populated with content and hey presto! A finished website. For this approach you are likely to be working in separate teams for each main discipline and unlikely to be regularly user testing your work.
About 5 years ago I joined Valtech, a company with a long history of delivering large scale technical solutions using Agile delivery methods. This meant that I had to make the transition from working in a Waterfall delivery system to Agile. About the same time I joined Valtech, Jeff Gothelf had just released Lean UX; a book challenging how we think about design processes for digital, and one that has influenced how we do things at Valtech.
At Valtech we’ve combined Lean UX ideas and Agile delivery methods into our mixed disciplined teams. These teams usually consist of:
· Creative Director
· Art Director
· UX designers
· User Research consultants
· Developers
· BA’s
· QA’s
· Project managers
Instead of months of upfront design, we work iteratively in small chunks so that we can start the delivery of assets more quickly. We work collaboratively and include stakeholders in as much of the activities we undertake as possible. We don’t spend months gathering requirements upfront, instead our designs are driven by data and user needs. We use the outputs of workshops to create our design brief.
Moving on from a Waterfall approach was a huge change for me and one that I struggled with in the beginning. For years previously I had had a certain security within my creative team and a certain authority over what the outcome would be. Now I was part of a mixed discipline team and one of many voices, each of who had as much importance as my own design voice.
This post aims to give some tips and insight to designers who are new to this way of working.
Working iteratively
Learn to love working iteratively. This means sharing designs as early as possible so you can elicit feedback. It might be that your design is still a sketch, or a very early full colour design. It is not something that has been worked on for days without input.
This can take a bit of getting used to. If you’re used to crafting something to near perfection before sharing, it can be quite daunting to share ‘unfinished’ designs but the early feedback ultimately means better results. Feedback could come in the form of early user testing, stakeholders input or views from other team members.
Collaboration and mixed discipline teams
Lean and Agile methods promote the idea of mixed discipline teams. This more collaborative way of working is fantastic. Learning and getting insight from your teammates, especially those who have a totally different viewpoint, helps you produce an end result that not only looks great but functions well and meets users needs.
If you’re not used to developers critiquing your work, don’t fear! These guys have excellent insight and ideas, and as technology moves at such a pace, input from experts like them is crucial. The other benefit is as a team you’re all bought into the end design solution, working together to craft it.
Collaboration makes you think much harder about your design rationale. However, as a designer, it can be hard to fight your corner sometimes — yes it does need that video/colour/button style because the brand is X/Y/Z etc. If you’re not comfortable with this make sure you can get support from someone who gets what you’re doing.
Sometimes part of my role has been to educate non-designers. On a project for NHS Choices I had to demonstrate the value of producing a variety of creative routes. Creative routes are multiple concepts that each take a different high level visual approach to a design challenge. In our case, we explored various ways of interpreting the NHS brand on the homepage with the goal of establishing which visual design direction resonated most with customers. Having key stakeholders see the process of creating the routes, and the following engagement from customers and internal staff (who dot voted their favourite and provided excellent feedback), proved the value of allowing for design exploration.
Design studios
These are great workshops that get everyone up at the board or on a bit of paper expressing their ideas. We practice a variety of exercises, my favourite two being:
- Sketching sessions where we ask everyone to sketch out their solution for a particular problem. This works brilliantly when you have multiple stakeholders with different ideas as you can really dig into their core thoughts through the sketches. Use the sketches as a kind of visual insight to feed into a brief rather than a requirement.
- Design sliders where we explore different design or brand attributes, usually at the start of a project where we need to establish a visual direction and design brief. For these there is no right or wrong answers just choices. For example: Loud vs Quiet or Fun vs Conservative. Again, having multiple stakeholders take part is helpful in establishing consensus.
User testing (and not just at the end)
I love user testing. The ability to get real feedback on designs is fantastic. Tools like InVision mean that even us designers can now prototype and online tools like Usability Hub mean that even if you don’t have access to real customers or a proper user research person you can find out for yourself if your design is working — at least to some degree.
User testing is often based around task completion but you can also gain valuable insight on design. A/B testing of two options is one way. Also, listening to what users say about what they are presented with is another.
For NHS Choices, one of the concept routes we proposed had very minimal amounts of blue in it. Our user research testing found that customers expected NHS blue to feature quite strongly and so we reflected this in our subsequent iterations.
Design QA
Another benefit to working in a mixed team is that you can QA your work as it’s being built. Meaning you and the developer can work together to make sure your designs are realised as intended, or work together to make them more awesome.
As the designer you can ensure quality control and help shape and evolve designs with the developers as they come through. Much better than a surprise later.
Creative thinking
In terms of creative thinking and time for big ideas, a Waterfall process actually works well, as it often led the piece of work I was doing.
I’ve found that strict adherence to Lean UX can make it difficult for high level creative thinking — for example if you are proposing a whole new design direction for a project. However, you can still integrate time for exploration into a Lean or Agile process.
How we deal with this at Valtech is by allowing extra time for exploration. This idea was borne out of frustration from people like me who needed more space for design thinking — exploration of multiple concepts, design direction, moodboards, brand etc. Once the visual style is at a suitable place we then integrate into the test / measure / learn cycle. We often run this kind of work in parallel so that it doesn’t affect any other delivery outputs we may have. We are still working collaboratively so the concepts we come up with are agreed and shaped by the team as a whole.
To conclude….
There are many great reasons to embrace Lean and Agile as a creative, these are some of them. If you’re not practicing this already — go and try it out! I would also be really interested to hear from other designers about their experiences and preferred ways of working. Please get in touch.
