We often hear from User Experience vendors that Agile projects can be frustrating to work on. Usually there is not enough time at the beginning of the project to explore the overall design. Instead development often begins and the design emerges one page and one screen at a time. Without a thoughtful and considered review of the user needs the system often ends up feeling like a patchwork solution. The result of this haphazard approach is that the user interface fails to meet its full potential. This can cause a tension between User Experience professionals and Agile developers.
We will share how we overcame this with our story of how a conservative IT organization within a very large risk-averse corporation has been able to embrace a hybrid agile approach. This approach integrates focused User Experience design while still providing great flexibility during development. It also provides sponsoring executives the confidence to fund projects by understanding at the outset the returns the project will deliver. We believe that many of the lessons we have learned along the way will be helpful to others struggling to embed Agile practices at large corporations.
Our company requires every project to go through a multi-stage gate process to secure workers and funding. We will show how we have been able to hijack the gating process to achieve an in-depth understand of end customer needs. This understanding results in a very focused Agile project.
We will discuss a process that uses User Centered Design (UCD) techniques to remove much of the refactoring risk, promoting multiple check-ins with business customers. We achieve this by working at the right level of fidelity throughout the project. It eliminates the need for lengthy business requirements documents which are time consuming to produce and leave customers unsure whether the solution will deliver to their ultimate needs. Instead of asking customers “what should the system do” we as IT professionals show them what the system will do and ask them to respond to low fidelity paper based prototypes, placing our customers in the role of editors and not authors. We have trained our business analysts to successfully conduct these UCD techniques to ensure a much deeper understanding of user needs and to get feedback quickly on early concepts.
These steps can be accomplished quickly resulting in a wireframe user interface about 75% complete. This roadmap is the backbone for the project and gives the entire team a clear understanding of the ideal overall framework. It is from this framework that all the subsequent design and development work must hang. It is astounding to watch the passion our business analysts and developers show for meeting user needs after participating in the process.
The end result is a system which delivers high customer value and satisfaction with a much lower risk of refactoring than typical Agile projects.
- Foundation
- 213 CD
- Date:October 15, 2015
- Time:11:00 am
- Event:Southern Fried Agile 2015
