Tag: collaboration

Doing UX inside of Scrum

Some notes on how I am currently “doing user experience” inside of Scrum. This approach has evolved from my projects at Hubbub as well as more recently my work with ARTO and on a project at Edenspiekermann. So I have found it works with both startups and agency style projects.

The starting point is to understand that Scrum is intended to be a container. It is a process framework. It should be able to hold any other activity you think you need as a team. So if we feel we need to add UX somehow, we should try to make it part of Scrum and not something that is tacked onto Scrum. Why not tack something on? Because it signals design is somehow distinct from development. And the whole point of doing agile is to have cross-functional teams. If you set up a separate process for design you are highly likely not to benefit from the full collective intelligence of the combined design and development team. So no, design needs to be inside of the Scrum container.

Staggered sprints are not the answer either because you are still splitting the team into design and development, hampering cross-collaboration and transparency. You’re basically inviting Taylorism back into your process—the very thing you were trying to getting away from.

When you are uncomfortable with putting designers and developers all in the same team and the same process the answer is not to make your process more elaborate, parcel things up, and decrease “messy” interactions. The answer is increasing conversation, not eliminating it.

It turns out things aren’t remotely as complicated as they appear to be. The key is understanding Scrum’s events. The big event holding all other events is the sprint. The sprint outputs a releasable increment of “done” product. The development team does everything required to achieve the sprint goal collaboratively determined during sprint planning. Naturally this includes any design needed for the product. I think of this as the ‘production’ type of design. It typically consists mostly of UI design. There may already be some preliminary UI design available at the start of the sprint but it does not have to be finished.

What about the kind of design that is required for figuring out what to build in the first place? It might not be obvious at first, but Scrum actually has an ongoing process which readily accommodates it: backlog refinement. These are all activities required to get a product backlog item in shape for sprint planning. This is emphatically not a solo show for the product manager to conduct. It is something the whole team collaborates on. Developers and designers. In my experience designers are great at facilitating backlog refinement sessions. At the whiteboard, figuring stuff out with the whole team ‘Lean UX’ style.

I will admit product backlog refinement is Scrum’s weak point. Where it offers a lot of structure for the sprints, it offers hardly any for the backlog refinement (or grooming as some call it). But that’s okay, we can evolve our own.

I like to use Kanban to manage the process of backlog refinement. Items come into the pipeline as something we want to elaborate because we have decided we want to build it (in some form or other, can be just an experiment) in the next sprint or two. It then goes through various stages of elaboration. At the very least capturing requirements in the form of user stories or job stories, doing sketches, a lo-fi prototype, mockups and a hi-fi prototype and finally breaking the item down into work to be done and attaching an estimate to it. At this point it is ready to be part of a sprint. Crucially, during this lifecycle of an item as it is being refined, we can and should do user research if we feel we need more data, or user testing if we feel it is too risky to commit to a feature outright.

For this kind of figuring stuff out, this ‘planning’ type of design, it makes no sense to have it be part of a sprint-like structure because the work required to get it to a ‘ready’ state is much more unpredictable. The point of having a looser grooming flow is that it exists to eliminate uncertainty for when we commit to an item in a sprint.

So between the sprint and backlog refinement, Scrum readily accommodates design. ‘Production’ type design happens inside of the sprint and designers are considered part of the development team. ‘Planning’ type of design happens as part of backlog refinement.

So no need to tack on a separate process. It keeps the process simple and understandable, thus increasing transparency for the whole team. It prevents design from becoming a black box to others. And when we make design part of the container process framework that is Scrum, we reap the rewards of the team’s collective intelligence and we increase our agility.

Prototyping is a team sport

Lately I have been binging on books, presentations and articles related to ‘Lean UX’. I don’t like the term, but then I don’t like the tech industry’s love for inventing a new label for every damn thing. I do like the things emphasises: shared understanding, deep collaboration, continuous user feedback. These are principles that have always implicitly guided the choices I made when leading teams at Hubbub and now also as a member of several teams in the role of product designer.

In all these lean UX readings a thing that keeps coming up again and again is prototyping. Prototypes are the go-to way of doing ‘experiments’, in lean-speak. Other things can be done as well—surveys, interviews, whatever—but more often than not, assumptions are tested with prototypes.

Which is great! And also unsurprising as prototyping has really been embraced by the tech world. And tools for rapid prototyping are getting a lot of attention and interest as a result. However, this comes with a couple of risks. For one, sometimes it is fine to stick to paper. But the lure of shiny prototyping tools is strong. You’d rather not show a crappy drawing to a user. What if they hate it? However, high fidelity prototyping is always more costly than paper. So although well-intentioned, prototyping tools can encourage wastefulness, the bane of lean.

There is a bigger danger which runs against the lean ethos, though. Some tools afford deep collaboration more than others. Let’s be real: none afford deeper collaboration than paper and whiteboards. There is one person behind the controls when prototyping with a tool. So in my view, one should only ever progress to that step once a team effort has been made to hash out the rough outlines of what is to be prototyped. Basically: always paper prototype the digital prototype. Together.

I have had a lot of fun lately playing with browser prototypes and with prototyping in Framer. But as I was getting back into all of this I did notice this risk: All of a sudden there is a person on the team who does the prototypes. Unless this solo prototyping is preceded by shared prototyping, this is a problem. Because the rest of the team is left out of the thinking-through-making which makes the prototyping process so valuable in addition to the testable artefacts it outputs.

It is I think a key oversight of the ‘should designers code’ debaters and to an extent one made by all prototyping tool manufacturers: Individuals don’t prototype, teams do. Prototyping is a team sport. And so the success of a tool depends not only on how well it supports individual prototyping activities but also how well it embeds itself in collaborative workflows.

In addition to the tools themselves getting better at supporting collaborative workflows, I would also love to see more tutorials, both official and from the community, about how to use a prototyping tool within the larger context of a team doing some form of agile. Most tutorials now focus on “how do I make this thing with this tool”. Useful, up to a point. But a large part of prototyping is to arrive at “the thing” together.

One of the lean UX things I devoured was this presentation by Bill Scott in which he talks about aligning a prototyping and a development tech stack, so that the gap between design and engineering is bridged not just with processes but also with tooling. His example applies to web development and app development using web technologies. I wonder what a similar approach looks like for native mobile app development. But this is the sort of thing I am talking about: Smart thinking about how to actually do this lean thing in the real world. I believe organising ourselves so that we can prototype as a team is absolutely key. I will pick my tools and processes accordingly in future.

All of the above is as usual mostly a reminder to self: As a designer your role is not to go off and work solo on brilliant prototypes. Your role is to facilitate such efforts by the whole team. Sure, there will be solo deep designerly crafting happening. But it will not add up to anything if it is not embedded in a collaborative design and development framework.