The experience strategy is to give an Agile UX process to product development that is lean and focused on iterative design by learning early and often. My focus on a product is to discover pain points, time on task and learn about the process and methods of customer/user experiences to provide the best possible Minimal Viable Product.
Agile UX
- Defined the big picture scenario that describes a holistic product experience the team is designing for which is helpful in writing user stories during sprint planning.
- Identify a set of experience design principals that guide design decisions. Making the principals simple to understand, the agile team easily adopted these UX principals.
- Developed a user experience vision that describes a potential product experience that evolves from core UX design principals. This vision alleviated stress on the agile team.
View the blog post on Agile UX Designer with RACI exercise applied
Agile Product Design Process
- Interviewing – View example of the interview process
Interview users, customers, subject matter experts, stakeholders to get an understanding of how the existing workflow works. I discover pain points and what problems they are having vs business problems. - Collaborative Chartering – View example result of Collaborative Chartering
A good UX Designer can help get a team back on track by establishing a shared vision or “Collaborative Charter”. Created with any agile team, the charter can do the following:- Identify direction and purpose
- Build loyalty through involvement
- Inspire enthusiasm and encourage commitment
- Set standards of excellence that reflects high ideals and a sense of integrity
- Bring meaning to the work
- Mobilize the team to action
- Card Sort Workshop – View Card Sort exercise
Perform a Card Sorting exercise to get an understanding of how content and features relate to the overall product. Helps develop an empathetic look into how people organize and think about categories and content. - Ideation (Sketboarding) Workshop – View results of a Sketchboard session
“Sketching for understanding” is an efficient and effective way to gather tons of ideas in a short period of time while cultivating shared understanding across agile teams. With the right structure and active participation, sketching for SCRUM teams can really pay dividends throughout the release life cycle. - Inventory screens and workflow
Take screenshots of pages and modals of functionality in current system and workflows - Inventory site mapping, concept models, task flows – View example of site map, concept model and task flow
Develop a site map for to show page mapping. Constructed concept models for specific functionality which need to worked out when teams struggle with coming to agreements. Design task flow diagrams to help demonstrate use cases and workflow. - Heuristic Evaluation
Examine the interface design for usability problems that could be causing many pain points. Often times pain is caused by poor usability design - Rapid interactive prototyping – View the prototypes
Develop interactive HTML prototypes using Axure RP Pro or InVision. I use these prototypes to review with stakeholders and developer teams. I would also use these prototypes to do usability testing with internal and external clients. - User testing (Product evaluation) – View sample of a product evaluation
Conduct usability tests through remote product evaluation sessions using our interactive prototypes. The users are given a set tasks to complete and are given scores on a scale of 1-3 for each task they are given. User testing was given to a select group of internal and external participants. To be affective, these sessions must be moderated and carefully administered without leading or promoting the design. - Stakeholder reviews
Prototypes are used to review with stakeholders, subject matter experts, and development teams. These reviews are conducted in small groups to avoid over engineering and design by committee which tends to happen when there are strong opinions and feelings based on product management and ownership. - Design Pattern development – Examples of Design Patterns, ONPOINT rebrand efforts
Visually design the user interface with design patterns that develop and work out into components which can be reused throughout the application. Each design pattern describes the style, gives an understanding of the problem, defines the solution and usage, and display alternative views - Writing User Stories and Acceptance Criteria
Using Rally Agile Software or JIRA, Write EPIC stories and users stories for those EPIC stories to start getting an idea and projecting development timeframes and estimates. I work with Project Managers, Product Manager and Developer Leads to determine what EPIC stories and user stories would get worked on for each product release. I would work ahead for each Sprint Iteration to write acceptance criteria for Sprint Planning. At Sprint Planning, I would demo the prototype in detail and review the acceptance criteria for each story we wanted to get developed for the Sprint Iteration. I was typically the owner of the user stories for acceptance during development sprint iteration cycles. Communication and daily chatter about the stories as they are getting developed is very important to the development iteration. - Concept documentation – View sample of documentation
In instances where more research was required, I wrote documentation regarding the workflow of campaign statuses and its entity statuses. I also wrote other documentation regarding how advanced faceted search will interact with filters and page views. - Closed Feedback Loop integration (Voice of the Customer Program)
We need a way to incorporate and manage the feedback and categorize or find themes from the feedback provided back to us. We can then share the feedback with our Stakeholders keeping them informed and having visibility into the feedback process. - Product reviews & marketing videos – View example of video
Create demos of final developed product features after each sprint iteration to all stakeholders and product SMEs. This helps facilitate the progress being made for our Agile development life cycle and promote the user experience and feedback. Also produce and facilitate marketing videos of the demos for products progress pointing out features that are improved.