Integrating UX

in Agile Software

Development




Reasons for this presentation


Introduction to what User Experience (UX) is


How UX can help to achieve your business goals


How to integrate UX in an agile development environment




Introduction to UX


What is UX?


User experience design (UXD)

is any aspect of a user's experience with a given system, including the interface, graphics, industrial design, physical interaction, and the manual.In most cases, User Experience Design fully encompasses traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design, and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users.


What does UX encompass?

UX: the gatekeeper

UX components during development





How can UX help

achieve business goals?




Don't make customers happy.


Make happy customers.

Why does UX matter?

The additional value


Differentiate from competitors


Increase brand value

Increase of Sales

Increase of productivity

Increase perceived customer value

Increase of customer loyalty

Know your user

Personas

Identify the user's pain points

Scenarios


Stories describing one or more tasks in a specific environmental situation.

They should focus on the activities people do and the context in which they do them.

For the design of services and systems we can use scenarios to understand and communicate what activities our system needs to support.

Why are we doing this?


Using personas, stories and scenarios is a way to pull the entire team into a user-centric process.


Rather than simply concentrating on features and structures from the top down, a user-centric environment builds the entire experience from the ground up.


By creating a foundation based in user-centric principles we have a much better chance of producing an effective and satisfying product in the first iteration.

Understanding leads to insight


Who's our customer?


What pain points do they have related to our product?


How will our product solve their pain points?


What features are important?

Align business goals with user's needs


--> leads to features




How to integrate UX

in Agile development


Our Scrum process


  • Preparation phase
  • Guesstimate
  • UX workshop
  • Sprint planning
  • Sprint!
  • Demo
  • Retrospective

Our Scrum process


  • Preparation phase leads to stories
  • Guesstimate leads to re-prioritization
  • UX workshop leads to tasks
  • Sprint planning leads to estimation & sprint planning
  • Sprint! leads to completed tasks
  • Demo leads to sign off by Product Owner
  • Retrospective leads to Improving the way we work

Process leading up to a story

Preparation phase


  • Business case
  • Concept
  • Vision
  • Release plan
  • Initial product backlog (stories)

Who's prepping


Product owner

with help from
Project Manager, Architect, UX Designer & Requirements Analist

Vision

Role of Product Owner

  • Is market focused
  • Develops long-term and short-term product strategy & road map
  • Helps position the product against competition
  • Thinks about long-term viability of the product
  • Does NOT make "knee jerk"* decisions
  • Is responsible for the preparation phase and the product backlog


* an immediate unthinking emotional reaction produced by an event or statement to which the reacting person is highly sensitive

Role of Architect

in the preparation phase

  • Safe guards that other systems, 3rd party applications, external partners and consumers of the application's data are all included
  • Advises the PO in prioritizing the issues by assessing the possible technical solutions and effort required
  • Assesses the roles & skills required to complete the project

Role of UX Designer


  • Assesses & safeguards the users' interests & needs
  • Communicates a vision for the product by building a shared understanding across the team
  • Engages in regular conversations and discussions around early design idea

Stories


Are specified by Product Owner

with the assistance of the Requirements Analist

and help of UX Designer (when users' needs have to be researched/assessed)


"As an [user type] I want to [do some action]

so that [business value]"


Stories state WHAT needs to be built.

Road travelled



Guesstimate stories

Development team will 'guesstimate' (roughly estimate) the stories at the top of the backlog to give PO a rough idea so that he can prioritize these stories.


We guesstimate based on T-shirt sizes

  S | M | L | XL 

Business value vs effort

The guesstimate enables the PO to weigh value vs effort and base prioritization of the stories in the backlog on the relation between these two factors. The guesstimate supports the PO in prioritizing the stories.

UX workshop



Team picks up stories

What we do during a UX workshop

  • UX Designer explains user & his problem to the team
  • UX Designer presents possible solution/sketch to get started (optional)
  • Each team member thinks of possible solution (sketch)
  • Every one gets few minutes to present his solution
  • Come to best solution by choosing/merging ideas
  • Team asks PO questions if necessary

Collaborate


Development team breaks down the story into tasks.

Sprint planning

  • Estimate tasks in hours
  • Pull tasks into the sprint
  • Break them down further (if needed) into tasks of 2 - 16 hours


Determining the goals of the sprint is a process of negotiation

between the product owner and the team.

Sprint


  • 2-4 week sprints

  • Developers pick up tasks based on expertise and priority

  • Tasks move from status TO DO to DONE

Scrum Master


Keep the wolves of scope creep at bay

Role of Scrum Master


  • Establishes practices and rules
  • Ensures everyone plays by the rules
  • Resists adding new features
  • Coaches & shields the team
  • Removes impediments
  • Ensures code inspections happen
  • Runs daily Scrum meetings

Demo

Retrospective

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