UX workshop @ People’s Playground
How a small, multi-disciplinary and self-motivated team in Amsterdam inspired me to continue spreading the word.
This is Inês (@inesvilamona) on the left. She’s the Design lead at People’s Playground.
Inês heard from a very good friend of hers about the workshops I had taught in Lisbon and invited me to come to Amsterdam for a day of sharing experiences, learnings and discussing how to fit the UX process in the agile methodology that the team adopted about a year ago.
Methodology
The mentality at People’s Playground is one of sharing. They use Holacracy to self-organize and each of the team’s elements has the ownership and the autonomy to make decisions that help take the projects forward.
Having the ability to do what’s best for the team going forward was what had Inês bringing me in to help them fitting the Design process in their sprints of development.
Our sprint velocity is getting better and better. We are more accurate and imperative with our backlog stories. But still Design feels like a phase completely apart.
Inês Vila Mona Santiago
Challenges
The team, like every other team, has a few challenges. The major one from a design perspective I’d say, is one I’m very familiar with —having high fidelity designs for review from day 1.
Creating a big design on initial phases takes up a lot of time and effort and by the time Inês and her team need to have the design ready for the initial review with clients, there are already other projects waiting in line.
Agenda
The agenda for the day was completely focused on the UX process.
I was able to skip the initial part (that’s when I normally act like I’m filming for a drama movie) where I talk about how Usability and User Experience are essencial from day one in a project. The team has a fantastic understanding of how this is important and are willing to adjust to embrace the UX.
Did I mention they’re a small team? That they all have different skills and they sit together. They are there from day one with their clients, sharing a great understanding of the projects and what’s being asked —so my work here is half done :)
My main goal was giving them the tools to enhance their processes and fit UX in a more agile way.
One team
We kicked off by discussing how important is to work as one team (People’s Playground team + client) from day one.
Personas
It’s very important that the team knows who they’re designing for and not just consider their direct clients. Who’s their audience? What are their needs and limitations?
If the client lacks of previous research and information on who their audience is, a good thing to do might be creating proto-personas. These are fictional representations of the client’s target audience and, as there’s no previous research, we treat these personas as assumptions that we’ll validate during the course of the project when testing against similar customers.
Having personas in mind while trying to come up with solutions is great. This way the team ensures that their audience is taken into account while designing the experience.
Design Studio — the importance of collaborative sessions
Ideally, they’d get everyone in one room for a day to look at requirements and possible solutions. Collaborative sessions are great! They give our clients and stakeholders ownership of the project by having them contributing with ideas from day one. Plus, it’s great for the development team as they get out of these sessions with something pre-signed-off to focus on.
Sharing, Prototyping and User Testing
It’s great to run user testing sessions while still in initial stages of the project. That helps the team learn about the solution they’re trying to build very early in the process and allows more time to iterate and change the course if need be.
Prototyping in early stages might mean using paper. Paper prototypes are a great way to test with other teams and clients and are a lean method to quickly iterate. Also, putting designs up on boards, walls and passageways are great to get daily feedback.
Work ahead of the Dev team…
…and give them tools to kick off the work without a final hi fi design. Providing the development team with wireframes and the client’s brand style guide might be a good way to have them starting the project without a final visual design. This way, the team can ensure that they are all dedicated to the same project at the same time instead of going back to a waterfall method where the dev team only kicks off when they are handed over a final design.
Wrapping up the day
The team was very excited by the end of the day to start implementing these tools. We had so many good discussions and I learned a lot from them. Bouncing off ideas, sharing the knowledge and past experiences is such an added value to these workshops.
A few days later I got a twitter notification from them: they’ve just implemented a Design board to get feedback from everyone that walks past it.
I immediately feel really happy with the board. And what I’m most proud of is that with just a few tips this team is now getting a better experience out of designing a product.
We’ve implemented a Design board, where the first sketches, wireframes, UI/UX are exposed and open to discussion. Everyone is invited to analyse and constructively comment and the Design team gathers the given feedback and iterate on that.
Read Inês’ post about the day here
If you’d want to know more about the work I do and how I do it please get in touch.
