YouAreHere: UX + Agile

In his column at Wired Magazine David Allen paints a picture of how the future could look like in the field of productivity (and creativity!) enhancing software. He envisions intelligent walls and rooms which proactively help you make associations based on the knowledge it has about you, your life, your connections and your prior work.

What I need is more real estate in which to think, and tools to facilitate the process. I need it to be systematised intelligently so that when I engage with it I'm stimulated, not stupefied.

In many respects, function follows form. So as the digital tools have got smaller, the danger is that our thinking has, too.

...

The great new frontier for productivity-enhancing software is in idea generation. Sure, you can use your tiny little PDA to look up words, find quotations and idea-shop until you drop. But it's not a room.

Apparently last week there was an actual conference on integrating (UX) design and (Agile) development at the University of Minnesota called Code Freeze 10.

There were some interesting speakers like Alan Cooper, writer of About Face 3 on the Interaction Design process and Jeff Patton Agile Coach and expert on how to integrate UX into Agile.

In a post on his weblog Bob MacNeal proposes an approach to integrate interaction design (and therefore UX) into Agile projects is to alternate between Discovery iterations and Delivery Iterations:

The diagram below shows what the iterative cycles of User-Driven Rapid Prototyping might look like:

Where

• The hand palming the spiral is a Discovery or Re-Discovery Iteration
• The subsequent handless spirals are Delivery Iterations
• Discovery iterations, after iteration zero, are called Re-Discovery
• Odd iterations are for coding and delivery, while Even iterations are for discovery (interactive research and design).

 

In Discovery Iterations the focus is on learning about the intended users of the product and improving the user experience and usability of what is already built. In Delivery Iterations the focus is on delivering new functionality.

Does anyone have experience with this approach?

Usability expert W Craig Tomlin shared 7 Usability predictions for 2010 which may not be very controversial but are insightful.

Three of them have to do with usability becoming quicker and cheaper and more of a commodity:

1. The cost of conducting usability testing will decrease by a factor of 10.
2. There will be a dramatic increase in the use of low cost web-based usability testing tools.
4. Use of remote moderated usability testing will increase by a factor of 10

As more and more cheaper tools are available it becomes easier and cheaper to run a usability test. This is a positive trend when doing usability work inside an Agile environment where the results are needed fast for implementation in the next sprint.

This point is also worth noting:

5. The UK [and EU] will become a major source of usability expertise

W Craig notes the large amount of Usability related job openings in Europe. The field is clearly growing, these are good times to be in the Usability field!

Fun presentation using sticky notes from an Information Architect on how agile (here called 'washing machine') improved her companies design process.

Great observation from blogger Jason Furnell: the 5 principles of Lean thinking align very well with how user experience designers like to work.

There is an assumption that the standard set of UX activities and outputs should simply slot into agile development practices unchanged
Lets flip the question and ask what would a UX Design project look like if you were to manage it following Agile principals.
The point of re-framing the question is to directly challenge the UX community to rethink its approach and bear the burden of transformation in order to move towards supporting a more effective and enjoyable way of actually delivering real, live user experiences for customers.

On the 'Agile Experience Design' network several User experience designers and Agile Developers get together to discuss the integration of the two disciplines. Very interesting to see how people are seeing their roles change and embracing new and more effective ways of working together towards quality end results.

Agile UX is Good, But Can Get Better

This year, we asked study participants how extensively UX was integrated into their projects and how satisfied they were working on projects with a particular development methodology. They indicated their answers on a 1–5 scale, with 5 indicating the highest level of integration or satisfaction:

Project Methodology	Integration of User Experience	Satisfaction with the Method
Waterfall	2.5	2.9
Agile	3.1	3.7
Iterative	3.2	3.8

Clearly, Agile is considerably better than the old Waterfall method.

Even good old Jakob Nielsen has done research about the combination of UX and Agile. This is becoming mainstream quickly!
According to their study the team members (ux people and developers) were very satisfied with the results:: both the level of integration of UX into the process as the satisfaction with the Agile method were very high compared to the Waterfall method.

If the agile and UEX communities are going to work together effectively, they need to find a middle ground.  I believe that middle ground exists, but that both communities need to adopt several changes in order to succeed.  First, agile professionals must:

• Learn UEX skills. .[...].
• Accept that usability is a critical quality factor.  [...]
• Adopt UI and usage style guidelines.  Developers must understand that not only should their code follow common guidelines, so should their UIs. 

 

Similarly, UEX practitioners must make some changes.  They need to:

• Go beyond UEX.  Agilists have mostly abandoning the concept of building teams of specialists and instead favor teams of generalizing specialists.  The implication is that although UEX practitioners bring a critical skillset to a development team, they still need to learn a wider range of skills to become truly effective.  [...]
• Become embedded in ASD teams. By embedding UEX practitioners on agile teams, not only will this increase the chance UEX issues are addressed, it will help to promote UEX skills within the agile community [...]
• Give ASD approaches a chance.  Kent Beck suggested to Alan Cooper that a week be invested at the beginning of a project to explore interaction issues, although Cooper believed that wasn’t sufficient.  The easiest way to find out who is right is to actually try it in practice.
• Start looking beyond XP.  [...] To address UEX concerns you will very likely find that you need to tailor some of the principles and practices of Agile Modeling and/or the techniques of User-Centered Design into your base software process.

 

Scott W Amber urges us to try the combination of UX design and agile and explains what needs to change on both ends of the spectrum to make it happen.

To tell a story, one of the applications I built early on, it's not sexy but we were designing an application that would receive stuff that came into the back door of a grocery store and my response to that was "Gosh I can't design an application that helps people receive stuff at the back of a grocery store without going there, I have to see what it looks like". And it wasn't just me, I had a team of developers and I said "Let's go down to the grocery store and let's see people receive stuff at the grocery store". And we went back and we sat with the guy that receives carrots at the back door of the grocery store, we saw what his life was like, we snapped a few pictures we talked we watched him do his work and we came back and received stuff at the grocery store. That is talking to users and that is what interaction design is it doesn't take going finding a specialist to do it, it takes doing it.

I guess I would say "Yes, you can find interaction designers" but I might suggest that it might be a mistake to say that this is a specialist role that we get into the team part time. This is a way we are, just like Agile is a way we are, it's not something you pull in when you need it, I will worry about users one day a week or a week a month and rest of the time I will focus on building things.

In this interview Jeff Patton shares his ideas about UX with the Agile developers community. He also talks about how he is writing a book (together with Alistair Cockburn). Although he says he "hates the writing process" I hope he does finish it so we can get his knowledge about doing User Centered Design inside Agile projects.

This presentation compares waterfall and Agile processes and the pro's and con's from a UX point of view. It also does some proposals for possible processes. The video of the talk can be viewed online as well.