Design Thinking from the Trenches

How can you ensure that you are making informed design decisions and aren’t wasting time on building the wrong thing? How can you maximise the decision making power that UX Design has?

For all the jargon flying around regarding Agile Processes, Scrum Methodologies and Lean UX, there is surprisingly little guidance available on what it means to bring Design Thinking and User Centered Design into your daily grind when working on an established app.

Building off of existing concepts, Allard proposes tweaking the workflow that UX Designers have in a Scrum team so as to maximise the impact that design has for the product.

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Performed at Up Front UG, Berlin, May 2015

www.vanhelbergen.com
www.twitter.com/vanhelbergen

Slides with speaker notes: http://goo.gl/6VjSSi

Video: http://youtu.be/0E7grMtxqTA

http://up.front.ug/

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Speaker notes:

DESIGN THINKING
FROM THE TRENCHES
Introducing Phased Design Sprints into Scrum
Allard van Helbergen @vanhelbergen up.front.ug #47 May 2014

@vanhelbergen
OH HAI! I’M ALLARD
UX Designer @ Brandwatch
1 min

Social Analytics platform,
we enable clients to find relevant conversations for them in the social media space
and help them slice and dice and analyse the data around those conversations

HQ Brighton
Offices Berlin, Stuttgart, NY, Chicago, SF

We’re hiring
Critical: JavaScript, Java
But also QA, UX, Account Manager

Across the board!

DESIGN THINKING
FROM THE TRENCHES
Introducing Phased Design Sprints into Scrum
Q:
Who works with Agile/Scrum?
Who works with Design sprints?

How many designers?

Want to empower Design Decisions into Product? Have Design fit into Scrum?
This talk is for you!

A little bit of background
3 min
UCD Background:
Freelance dev: Kanban
Started at Accenture: Waterfall
Google: Design thinking Operational team so did not see but never combined
Startups are going to be awesome!

STARTUPS,
I AM DISAPPOINT
3 min

Startups: Where’s the interweaved design process?

A lot of talk about Agile/Lean
Turns out it’s really hard

Design has little input in Product
Due to a lot of pressure to deliver
Gut feeling reigns supreme

I’ve started developing a methodology
But first look at what we already have

Agile & Scrum
5 min

Agile/Lean
Ship early shift often

Idea
Launch
Build
Measure
Agile
ideate, build, launch, measure, iterate, repeat

Scrum
Fixed times
autonomous teams

Good
Resource control
Iterative cycle

Bad:
Design dependencies too tightly coupled. Sprint 0 doesn’t really work
No input from prototyping into dev
When does measurement actually happen?

Design Sprints
7 min

Learn early, learn often; ship with confidence

from Google Ventures
Daniel Burka
Jake Knapp

Empathise
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test

Idea
Launch
Build
Measure

Idea
Launch
Build
Measure
All decision makers in the room
Set up tests before hand

GOOD:
Forces prototype
Forces feedback

BAD:
For super small teams where everyone is available
not really applicable for established products, long-term, continuous

So what are we missing?
9 min

Data before we build
Prototyping and testing BEFORE dev
Design to guide product decisions
The power of Design into the Product

Design ready as much as possible BEFORE dev
Not coupled to Dev

The power of UCD
User testing AFTER dev
Metrics AFTER dev into

Soooo, that gave me the idea...

Y U NO HAVE
PHASED SPRINTS?
9 min

pre
Dev Sprint
11 min

Dev
1
2
3

Dev
1
2
3
UX

post
Dev Sprint
13 min

Dev
1
2
3

Dev
1
2
3
Test

Connect the Two
15 min

Dev
1
2
3
UX
Test
Ermagurd! Mini-waterfalls!

\o/
NO MOAR DISAPPOINT!
16 min

Run sprints like this
2 companies
6 sprints (2 week)
on going process building up skill and metrics

Issues:
You may not build new features all the time
You may not launch all the time
Continuous, so split time across multiple phases during your sprintWork on Design, Review and in-Sprint simultaneously

And you can do it too!
18 min

What can you do now?

Get ahead of the curve
As a designer take ownership of process
evangelise findings from pre- and post-sprints

BEFORE
Create Time pressure
Build prototypes that you are happy to throw away
Do quick research that immediately feeds into dev

AFTER
Do quick user testing that immediately feeds into dev
Start to embed metrics

Ship Early,
Ship Often
Ship early, ship often ->

Learn Early,
Learn Often
Learn early, learn often; ship with confidence ->

Learn Continuously,
Ship Continuously
Learn continuously, Ship continuously; Create with confidence

KTHXBAI
@vanhelbergen
https://speakerdeck.com/allardvanhelbergen/design-thinking-from-the-trenches
19 min

Transcript

1. Introducing Phased Design Sprints into Scrum Allard van Helbergen @vanhelbergen up.front.ug #47 May 2014
2. @vanhelbergen UX Designer @ Brandwatch
3. Introducing Phased Design Sprints into Scrum
9. Empathise Define Ideate Prototype Test
22. \o/
27. @vanhelbergen https://speakerdeck.com/allardvanhelbergen/design-thinking-from-the-trenches