Agile UX Virtual Summit 2017

My (somewhat) complete notes from the Agile UX Virtual Summit 2017 conference on June 13-16.

“Design Sprints: How to Solve Problems and Test Ideas in 5 Days”

John Zeratsky, Design Partner at Google Ventures

You’ll learn:

  • How to run a Google design sprint within your Agile team
  • Core activities for each day of the design sprint
  • How to adapt design sprints for different timelines
  • Newspaper design process – 1 day cycle
    • Goals
    • Ideas
    • Argue
    • Build
    • Ship
    • Test
  • FeedBurner – same design cycle as newspaper, but it took 3 months instead of 1 day
    • Wasted a lot of time arguing
    • Took a long time to ship
  • YouTube – same fundamental steps, but it took a year to get through the process
  • Google Ventures – Had an expert’s mindset
    • I’ll tell you what to do
    • Only works if you actually know what to do
    • Doesn’t work
  • Design sprint – Build and test a prototype in 5 days
    • Map (Monday)
    • Sketch (Tuesday)
    • Decide (Wednesday)
    • Prototype (Thursday)
    • Test (Friday)
  • Monday
    • Real team, no distractions
    • Questions
    • Map of the experience – select a target
  • Tuesday
    • Individual work – sketch ideas – super-detailed, anyone can do it
    • 10+ competing solutions
  • Wednesday
    • Make decisions
    • Voting, silently
    • Speed critique – chance for everyone to talk about ideas
    • The decider (decision maker) makes the call
    • Storyboard
  • Thursday
    • Prototype – needs to be finished by the end of the day
    • Realistic facade is what you want, not a real product
    • Use Sketch or even Keynote or some other tools
  • Friday
    • 1:1 interviews
      • Ask user to react out loud to design/experience
      • 5 per day
      • Team watches – take notes, write questions
    • A way to travel to the future and see what the users think
  • Resources:
    • Book: “Sprint: Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days”
    • Newsletter: Time Dorks
    • GV Library

“Building a Design System: A Practitioner’s Case Study”

Marcin Treder, CEO at UXPin

You’ll learn:

  • The most pressing challenges faced by Agile product teams today.
  • The emerging themes of Agile UX for 2017 and beyond.
  • Effective solutions for overcoming the hurdles of Agile UX.
  • Design systems help us be more agile, faster, smarter
  • Building a design system never ends, it’s the way we build a product
  • Building a design system
    • Why?
    • What?
    • How?
  • It always starts with research
  • The impossibility of scale
    • UI gradually decays into inconsistency
    • User happiness decreases
    • Teams become slower and slower
  • The entropy of a sufficiently complex digital product always increases
  • What is a design system?
    • It’s the process, not the result
  • What does it contain?
    • Building blocks
    • UI patterns
    • Rules
  • Pattern library or style guide?
    • Long history
  • Why today?: Why this time design systems are going to reach scale
    • Digital matters
    • Experience matters
    • Technology is ready
  • How?
    • Accept that building a design system is an ongoing process
      • It’s never going to end
      • Make it part of your product development
      • Start building it now
    • Form a multidisciplinary design operations team
      • If you can’t form a team, start on your own
      • This process should bring your team together
    • Build your interface inventory
      • A neatly organized box with all the pieces of your product
      • It shows all the glaring inconsistencies and services as a kick-off to the process
      • 2 kinds of inventories:
        • Screenshots
        • Collect actual examples (code?)
      • Do you want to see a real interface inventory?
    • Build your building blocks
      • Make it available
    • Accept that in a design system – design and code go arm in arm

“Great UX in an Agile World at Bloomberg”

Anthony Viviano, Interaction Designer at Bloomberg

You’ll learn:

  • How Bloomberg implemented Agile UX across offices
  • How to execute staggered sprints with designers and developers
  • How to employ a “Community of Practice” methodology to improve product consistency
  • bloomberg.com/ux
  • Lean UX
  • Agile — Scrum
    • Where does design fit in?
    • From perspective of Scrum, we are all developers
    • How do you fit everything needed in design into a single sprint?
    • Stories focused on personas
    • Software built prioritizing user values
    • Collaboration with developers is efficient
  • Flavors of Scrum
    • Religious
    • Agilefall (a.k.a. The Design Sprint)
    • UXaaS — Individual
    • UXaaS — Team
  • Challenge: The UX process takes time
    • Iteration cycle
    • Review cycle
    • Unknowns discovered
    • Typical UX work
  • Co-located teams?
    • Get on the phone every day
    • Do design studios live
  • Recommended changes to Scrum training
    • Customer – don’t just think about customer, but also end-user
    • Developers – better describe who is included
      • UX team
      • Developers
      • QA testers
    • Definition of done
    • Testing
  • Recommended UX best practices
    • Discovery and delivery
    • Staggered sprints
    • How to employ Community of Practice methodology to maintain consistency
  • Two track delivery
    • Doing discovery and delivery at the same time
  • Risk of staggered sprint
    • Slight waterfall
    • Unplanned work
      • Minor: just do it
      • Major: make a decision (prioritize with PM)
  • Benefits
    • Better working relationship between everyone
    • Everyone speaks same language
    • Shared knowledge and ownership
    • Focus on end user increases product value

“A Guide to User Story Mapping”

Kelley Howell, Sr. UX Architect at Syniverse

You’ll learn:

  • How to visualize user needs instead of product features
  • How to make better decisions when prioritizing a UX backlog
  • How to align sprints with UX strategy
  • Minimum Lovable Products
  • Book: “User Story Mapping” by Jeff Patton
  • What’s on tap today?
    • What’s so great about user story mapping?
    • Understand the user story
    • Write good user stories
    • Understand the relationship between goals, activities, tasks, and tools
    • The user story mapping process
  • Why user story mapping?
    • Part of a user-centered design process
    • Visual way to show people how to use your product
    • Visual representation of your product to help with: analyzing requirements, planning iterative releases, organizing the development process
  • The foundation — User story
  • Purpose of user story
    • Planning item
    • Token for a longer conversation
    • Method for deferring a longer conversation
    • Represents user needs and identifies user goals
    • Focuses team on solving users’ problems
  • User stories are also boundary objects
    • Bridge professional and disciplinary boundaries
    • Allow collaboration
  • A good user story:
    • Title — often a verb phrase
    • Description
      • As a [type of user] I want to [perform some task] so that I can [reach some goal]
    • Criteria for user acceptance
      • Is this done from the user’s point of view?
    • Add sketches and notes, specifications, wireframes, mockups
  • User stories don’t replace requirements
    • User stories are for longer, deeper conversations about what users need
    • Conversations are memorialized with artifacts
    • Artifacts include what we think of as traditional requirements
  • User story mapping
    • A method for analyzing and prioritizing a backlog
  • Benefits of user story mapping
    • Center users’ perspectives in our discussions
    • Prioritize in terms of user goals
    • Show relationships between different users and their workflows
    • Confirm completeness of a product backlog
    • Work as a team

“Design Sprints: A Non-Google Approach”

C. Todd Lombardo, Chief Design Strategist at Fresh Tilled Soil

You’ll learn:

  • All the activities required for realistic design sprints
  • How to modify your agenda and activities for different timelines
  • How to incorporate quantitative and qualitative data into design sprints
  • Book: “Design Sprint”
  • Everyone has a process
  • Design sprint processes
  • Our design sprint approach
    • Understand — What problem are you trying to solve?
    • Diverge — How do we solve that problem? Generate ideas
    • Converge — Prioritize your ideas
    • Prototype — Figure out key assumptions
    • Test — Were our assumptions valid?
  • Elements of Lean Startup and Lean UX
  • Making things people want is greater than making people want things
  • Understand
    • Get the background
    • Know the user
    • Define the problem
    • Wrap-up
  • Assumptions: what you think you know
  • Problem statement
    • Who? What? Why?
  • What are you (really) solving for?
    • Keep asking why
    • This is how you find what is really going to help your users
  • Diverge
    • Gear up
    • Generate solutions
    • Wrap-up
  • Quantity begets quality
  • Job stories
    • When [something] I need [something] so that [something]
  • You want to be thinking like an artist on the diverge day
  • Converge
    • Get started
    • Decision criteria
    • Sketching
    • Wrap-up
  • How can our assumptions help guide us?
  • Prototype
    • Prototype
    • Plan interviews
    • Wrap-up
  • Prototypes are minimum viable concepts
  • Think like an architect on prototype day
  • Test
    • Interviews
    • Wrap-up
  • Does your team focus on what is right or who is right? — Don’t let someone’s ego control your decisions

“Agile Prototyping Best Practices”

Nate Ginesi, Sr. UX Architect at LookThink

You’ll learn:

  • How to determine the right depth and breadth for MVP prototypes.
  • How to elicit the right stakeholder and user feedback.
  • How to correctly annotate prototypes for dev and QA.

“Increasing User Empathy in Agile Teams: Q&A Session”

Indi Young, Co-founder of Adaptive Path

You’ll learn:

  • How to naturally spread user empathy amongst stakeholders and developers
  • Useful user research tactics for Agile timelines
  • How to make user research and user empathy a ritual
  • If you are trying to walk in someone’s shoes without developing empathy you are really just walking in your own shoes.
  • Emotional empathy — being able to recognize and emotion that someone is going through and help them through it; taking their side
  • indiyoung.com
  • You can’t develop empathy without listening

“Design Spikes for an Agile Process”

Damon Dimmick, Director of Product Design and UX at Constant Contact

You’ll learn:

  • How to fit design spikes into a Scrum framework
  • How to address user stories without neglecting UX strategy
  • How to solve design problems before they become development issues
  • Fitting Big-Picture UX Into Agile Development
  • There is no one-size-fits-all solution for Agile
  • The Agile Manifesto
    • “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
    • Through speed and iteration, we can take on big issues
    • Design incrementally and deliver value with each move
  • “Spikes” in Agile — A story that cannot be estimated until a development team runs a timeboxed investigation. The output of a spike is an estimate for the original story.
  • Functional spikes
    • Design spikes are simply a type of functional spike
  • Why design sprints aren’t good enough
    • Prescriptive format
    • Velocity impact
    • Disruptive in iterations
    • Not sustainable
  • You can still use design sprints
    • Use them inside your design spikes
    • A design spike is the perfect place for design sprints to live
  • Dual-track Agile
    • Divide backlog into 2 different sections: discovery and delivery
  • We aren’t creating a perfect tool. At best we have something that will help us move forward and have more wins than fails.

“Participatory Design: Bringing Users Into Your Process”

David Sherwin, Co-founder at Ask the Sherwins
Erin Muntzert, Sr. UX Researcher at Google

You’ll learn:

  • Participatory design tactics practiced by frog design
  • Collaborative activities for finding user needs, generating, and evaluating design ideas
  • How to select and deploy participatory design activities within an Agile team
  • Participatory Design can help Agile teams better understand the needs of your customers and get the right design ideas into your products
  • What is Participatory Design? Why do we do it?
    • Full Participatory Design can overcomplicate the process
    • Participatory Design should simply be bringing customers directly into the product development process
    • There may be a divergence between what people say and what they do
  • Participatory Design activities you can use within Agile UX
    • Narration
      • Love/break-up letter
      • Day in the life
    • Creation
      • User interface toolkit
    • Prioritization — usability testing, evaluating any products and services you have; it doesn’t necessarily have to have a product associated with it; forces customers to make trade-offs
      • Card sort
      • Ranking
    • Contextualization — take a concept or idea that has already been created and grounding it back into real life scenarios
      • Scenario creation
      • Simulations
  • Using Participatory Design with your product teams
    • Participatory Design is more than usability testing
  • You don’t always have to build and measure to learn

“Faster Usability Testing in an Agile World”

Carol Smith, Sr. Design Manager at IBM Watson

You’ll learn:

  • How the IBM Watson team runs continuous usability testing
  • How to run follow a RITE testing process within an Agile team
  • When to run moderated, unmoderated, remote, and in-person tests
  • How to document user research patterns
  • Roles at IBM:
    • Design researcher
    • User experience designer
    • Visual designer
  • Light design — Lean UX
  • Faster usability testing
    • Fit testing into Agile
    • Never too early
    • Regular testing
  • Usability testing is…
    • Representative users
    • Doing real tasks
    • Being observed
    • Using prototypes or live products
  • Usability not user testing
    • There is a difference
    • User testing infers testing people
    • Usability puts emphasis on what is being tested
  • True statements
    • All interfaces have usability problems
    • Limited resources
    • More problems than resources
    • Fix most serious problems first
  • Parallel-track workflow (staggered sprint)
    • Developer track — focus on production
    • UX track — focus on user contact
  • 2 types of work:
    • Development — goal: working software
    • Discovery — goal: learning
  • The priority is always to make software
  • Constant communication
    • Between 2 tracks
    • Essential for success
    • 2 tracks, not 2 teams
  • Pros of parallel-track:
    • Space made for discovery
  • Cons of parallel-track:
    • Can lead to waterfall
    • Not a solo sport — need a team
  • Existing teams
    • Continuous improvement
    • Continue to prioritize dev work
    • Start small
    • May need a design spike
  • Clickable or code?
    • Clickable — easy and quick
    • Real code — risky; great if it’s the right solution
    • Not paper — participants may misunderstand
  • When should I test?
    • Early!
    • Anywhere
    • Anytime
    • Realistic test environment
  • Small scope is better for usability testing
    • 5-7 participants — ~80% of usability problems
    • More participants — more diminishing returns

“Replacing Requirements With Hypothesis: Framing Work to Promote Learning”

Josh Seiden, Co-author of Lean UX

You’ll learn:

  • A framework for deconstructing and validating product hypotheses
  • How to guide product strategy without overprescribing details
  • How to develop assumption backlogs
  • Book: “Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously”
  • Agenda
    • Lean UX, Agile, and uncertainty
    • Assumptions
    • Hypotheses
    • Experiments
    • Q/A
  • Old assumptions, new reality
    • Software is now continuous
    • If we aren’t releasing rapidly, our competitors will
  • The core of Agile
    • Accept that requirements are always going to change
    • Build a process that’s optimized for change — get rapid and continuous feedback
  • Over time, Agile became an engineering project management system
  • How do we put the pursuit of value back in Agile? — By creating a culture of continuous learning with Lean UX
  • Incremental development — start with a big vision, break into components, build one component at a time
  • Iterative Agile — build a small product, learn from it, do it again
  • Book: “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries
    • Reduce waste
    • Don’t build things people don’t want
  • Lean UX
    • Inspired by Lean Startup ad Agile development theories
    • Foundation: Shared understanding
  • Regular discussion and iteration creates broader buy-in
  • The Lean UX cycle
    • State the vision/idea/outcome
    • Declare your assumptions
    • Hypothesize: write the test first
    • Design an experiment
    • Make an MVP
    • Get out of the building
    • Team synthesis
    • Repeat
  • Summary
    • Use Lean methods to avoid waste
    • Use Lean methods when uncertainty is high
    • Cross-functional collaboration
    • Do it more the once
  • Declare your assumptions — What are the fundamental assumptions we have about our customers, their needs and our solution, if proven wrong, will cause us to fail?
  • Lean and the design of business
    • Every decision we make about our product is a customer experience decision
    • Declare your assumptions
    • Evaluation your results
  • Hypothesis statement
    • We believe that _____.
    • We’ll know this is true when we see [this evidence (from the market)].
  • Experiments and MVPs
  • Minimum Viable Product
    • What is the smallest thing we can do or make to test our hypothesis?
    • The answer to this question is your MVP
  • Focus on learning
    • What do we need to learn first?
    • What is the least amount of work we need to do to learn that?

“Lean UX in the Enterprise: A Hubspot Case Study”

Austin Knight, Sr. UX Designer at Hubspot

You’ll learn:

  • How to turn qualitative and quantitative data into UX insights.
  • How to practice data-informed design within an Agile process.
  • How to plan, strategize, and execute a redesign project in a couple weeks.
  • austinknight.com
  • “Lean Enterprise”
  • Waterfall processes
    • Research
    • Design
    • Engineering
  • UX added as a layer over all three processes
    • UX as the glue to hold all 3 things together and unify them
    • All one and and the same rather than 3 separate entities
    • Became a rough “Lean Process”
  • Cyclical process
    • Think — Make — Check
    • Fluid
    • Intended to adapt to every single project and the unique needs
  • Get feedback from customers as quickly as possible
  • Process
    • Think
      • Strategy
      • Research
      • Analysis
    • Make
      • Design
      • Implementation
    • Check
  • Use simple and focused tools
    • Google Apps — research and content
    • Prototyping tools — designs and assets
    • Slack — ongoing communications
    • Zoom and Loom — video conferencing
    • Confluence — wiki, results reporting
    • Schedule regular standups and reviews
    • Everything ultimately documented in JIRA — project management and communication; everything logged in tickets
  • Rapid and regularly release thoughtful solutions supported by user and business data
  • Keeping a team small and focused is going to help you avoid scope creep

“Collaborative Product Discovery and Strategy at Fjord”

Essi Salonen, UX Designer at Fjord

You’ll learn:

  • How to adapt user research and strategy methods for Agile timelines
  • How to turn research insights into a cohesive product strategy
  • Useful activities for “just enough research”
  • Process
    • Discover
    • Describe
    • Design
    • Deliver
  • Having versatile talent helps broaden your perspective on a product
  • Discover
    • The starting point for all new ideas
    • Interview stakeholders and users
    • Often teams don’t have enough time to find all the problems with a product
    • Process
      • Define the challenge
      • Observe people
      • Form Insights
    • Activities
      • Stakeholder interviews
      • Secondary research
      • Comparative audit
      • User interviews
  • Describe
    • Process
      • Hypothesize
    • Activities
      • Personas
      • Journey mapping
      • Ideation and co-creation
      • Sketching
      • Prototyping

“Design Thinking & Agile at IBM”

Vera Rhoads, Sr. UX Manager at IBM

You’ll learn:

  • How to transition through through inspiration, ideation, and implementation with a global team
  • How to turn “statements of intent” into prioritized user stories.
  • How to increase team velocity without sacrificing usability