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Agile Development + Lean UX

Lunch & Learn 9/6/2012

Karri Ojanen

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Agile Development + Lean UX

• There’s a lot of shared belief between Agile and Lean UX• Agile development is… “a collection of

methodologies that promote highly interactive and incremental development of software”, “the opposite of waterfall”

• Lean UX is… “a set of practices a design team can adopt to move towards Agile-like philosophy” BUT it’s different from forcing designers to work within the realm of Agile rituals

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What is UXD?

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User Experience Design

• Focus:• Optimize the product around how users can, want, or need to

use the product, rather than forcing the users to change their behavior to accommodate the product

• Process:• Who are the users?• Learn as much as you can about them in the context of the

problem you’re trying to solve for them• Take those learnings and your knowledge of design best

practices, cognition/psychology, ergonomics, sociology, etc to design solutions that help them meet their goals

• Test the validity of assumptions with regards to user behavior and effectiveness of designs in real world tests with actual users

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“Traditional” UX Practices

• Emphasize deliverables - wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, content inventories, mockups etc – and the need to polish them (which leads to long, detailed design cycles)

• See the work as a solution that gets sold to stakeholders

• See the (UX) designer as the hero in charge of finding solutions to design challenges and getting approval before development starts

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Lean UX Practices

• Less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed• Documents are stripped down to their bare components,

providing the minimum amount of information necessary to get started on implementation

• Work on hypotheses that are going to be tested, rather than solutions that are going to be sold

• Focus on making the right product before making the product perfect (cf. Minimum Viable Product)

• Short, iterative, low-fidelity design cycles• Collaboration, not command

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(Lean UX) Process

• Figure out who it’s for?• Interviews, personas, design target

• What can the user do that wasn’t possible before?• Activity map, concept drawings, storyboards

• What features does the user need for that?• Stickys, whiteboarding

• User’s needs + features > How do they fit together?

• Sketch it, (prototype it), then build it• “Fake it, then make it”

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Why Agile or Lean?

• Startup innovates in a context of uncertainty. There’s insufficient evidence to confidently answer questions like will people want this kind of product? Will people buy it? What should it look like? What features should it have?

• Because of the uncertainty, progress is measured by what we learn through experiments. Product success is found through repeated cycles of “build-measure-learn”

• Work is organized into the smallest possible batch size and launched quickly -> Agile

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Shared Goals

Agile development and Lean UX share a few goals:• Shorten the time to market• Working software over comprehensive

documentation• Collaboration over negotiation• Responding to change over following a

plan

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Challenges

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How Can We Improve Our Process?

• The design work we do is often limited to on-the-go type of decisions

• We allow only a limited amount of time for design• Because of that, it’s more difficult to develop,

protect, and nurture patterns in our design• We struggle with approvals• We don’t have an established process that

involves UXD, thus our scenario is not “going from traditional UX to lean”, but rather, “establishing our approach to UXD”

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Problem vs. Solution

“Focus on the problem. If you’re only excited about the solution, you’ll lose interest when

your solution doesn’t fix the problem.”- Adil Wali, CTO of ModCloth

Development focuses on the solution.

UX design focuses on the problem.

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Developer ≠ Designer

• The people who make things pretty is a different breed than the people who make things work

• A UX designer’s role is somewhere in the middle

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Integrating Design into Our Development Process

The “Traditional” Way(Waterfall + Waterfall or Waterfall + Agile)

1. Have a great idea

2. Wireframe

3. Designer creates a static mockup

4. Static mockup is thrown to devs to implement

The Collaborative Way(Lean UX + Agile Development)

1. Have a great idea

2. Wireframe

3. Engage devs to build a prototype

4. Play, tweak, rinse, repeat

5. Once UX is nailed have a designer polish to perfection

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The Benefits

• Designer’s time is not lost on features that aren’t shippable

• Timelines will not be disrupted by unforeseen technical hurdles

• Devs get to sit at the same table with designers

• Both design and development cycles remain as short as possible

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Thank You