Ramp Up Gradually If Your Team Is New to UX Design

Remember your first Agile project? It took a lot to convince people to trade lengthy spec documents for a stack of index cards, but everyone knew things needed to change. Even still, success wasn’t guaranteed and there was plenty of anxiety to go around.

Now imagine that same software team changing processes yet again, this time taking their first steps to incorporate user-centered design into their work. How will everyone feel? Who’s rooting for the change? How high are the stakes?

Avoiding a Big Bang

I’d argue this team should consider ramping up gradually and deepening their design process over time. Depending on the interpersonal dynamics, a Big Bang for design can be unnecessarily risky.

When start a project with a new client, the “bang” we gravitate towards is bang for the buck. We begin with lightweight techniques that yield outsized results and give the client a taste of what user-centered design offers. Here’s a few examples:

• Story Mapping is a lo-fi activity that uses sticky notes to take agile user stories to the next level. You start by calling out the users’ target outcomes, and then you break out the sequence of activities users actually perform to achieve each one. It’s a great way to clearly define the problem you’re solving, enabling you to work backwards and design a solution that fits.
• Personas are very tricky for inexperienced teams; if you’re just getting your feet wet, schedule five interviews with real users and discuss what you learned with the core contributors. Most teams walk away with at least a few ways to improve their offering and a better sense of the users’ target outcomes.
• If you think the team is ready for a more specific mental picture of the users, pull the names of your archetypes (i.e. personas) from the characters used in your marketing demos. You’ll have to pick some names to use for your demos anyway, and this gives the team a way to connect the personas to something concrete.
• Basic usability testing can be done in the hallway; skip the fancy lab environments with one-way glass until you really need it.

Each of these methods pave the way for more extensive practices in the future while building credibility and comfort with a design-driven process. The idea is to hand out an appetizer and see how people react before serving a big plate full of UX methodology.

One step at a time

I recently saw Dr. Steve Julius, former psychologist for the Chicago Bulls, give a presentation about behavior and process change within teams. When asked about the number one mistake people make in this area, he offered this:

They try to change too much, too fast—and they become zealots.

Sometimes, slow and steady wins the race.

Further reading

Most of the tips above have been collected from the following (fabulous) books; I strongly encourage you to dig into them for more.

• Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience, by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
• Undercover User Experience Design, by Cennydd Bowles and James Box
• The User Experience Team of One, by Leah Buley
• User Story Mapping, by Jeff Patton

The Lost Art of Prototyping →

This post (by a former engineer at Salesforce.com) represents a developer’s perspective on a prototyping approach nearly identical to the one we use at Appiphony. Clients sign off on a “steel thread” prototype built with actual code, and what comes after that is mostly testing and refactoring.

The Double Diamond Model of Product Design

This model, created by Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path and Groupon fame, best represents the product design process in a way that’s both complete and digestible. I wish I’d seen this when building out our process at Appiphony a few years ago.

Peter mentions creating it to clarify the full extent to which the design team is involved, and that definitely resonates with me. The piece I keep needing to explain is that design does not happen “up front” before “the work starts.” The detailed design of each component is part of the work, and it’s baked into each iteration cycle. The design-related work we do before that is figuring out how many of those components to build and doing the customer research we’ll need to fuel later phases.

Note: this model is only meant to highlight work done by the design team. It under-represents the effort needed by development, QA, marketing and others to actually ship.

The UX/BA Overlap

I’ve observed that once an organization institutes a design process before development, the design function effectively replaces what’s traditionally done by IT business analysts. This makes sense, as this article from UC Berkeley points out, since the pendulum swings from what the stakeholders say to what the users need.

The recent focus on data science, however, is an area of opportunity (or perhaps, refuge) for displaced BAs. (Note the purple area at the lower right.) Many designers have an art school background and are disinclined to attack data problems.

I’m generalizing in a way that’s insulting to both groups, but the larger trend is undeniable: as businesses incorporate more design to stay competitive, the days of those that transcribe stakeholder dictums into documents are numbered.

Build Your Product Without Silos

A silo-less way to build your products

Bill Buxton is a legend in the field of computing, and his book Sketching User Experiences is a classic for those building products. The title is actually a bit misleading: the book doesn’t specifically cover sketching, but instead provides a detailed walkthrough of the process of building great products.

These pictures from the book illustrate the product development process with increasing levels of maturity:

1. Engineering builds something, sales tries to sell it (no design)

2. Design is introduced prior to engineering

3. The walls separating those groups are broken down; management and marketing are integrated so the product has a consistent vision and story

If you’re struggling to get your company to focus more on design, try painting this larger picture and treat it as a stepping stone.