Agile software development and lean user experience design. How do they work together and benefit each other?

1. Agile Development + Lean UX
Lunch & Learn 9/6/2012
Karri Ojanen
Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.

2. Agile Development + Lean UX
• There’s a lot of shared belief between Agile
and Lean UX
• Agile development is… “a collection of
methodologies that promote highly interactive and
incremental development of software”, “the
opposite of waterfall”
• Lean UX is… “a set of practices a design team
can adopt to move towards Agile-like philosophy”
BUT it’s different from forcing designers to work
within the realm of Agile rituals
Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.

3. What is UXD?
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4. User Experience Design
• Focus:
• Optimize the product around how users can, want, or need
to use the product, rather than forcing the users to change
their behavior to accommodate the product
• Process:
• Who are the users?
• Learn as much as you can about them in the context of the
problem you’re trying to solve for them
• Take those learnings and your knowledge of design best
practices, cognition/psychology, ergonomics, sociology, etc
to design solutions that help them meet their goals
• Test the validity of assumptions with regards to user
behavior and effectiveness of designs in real world tests
with actual users
Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.

5. “Traditional” UX Practices
• Emphasize deliverables - wireframes, site
maps, flow diagrams, content inventories,
mockups etc – and the need to polish them
(which leads to long, detailed design cycles)
• See the work as a solution that gets sold to
stakeholders
• See the (UX) designer as the hero in charge
of finding solutions to design challenges and
getting approval before development starts
Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.

6. Lean UX Practices
• Less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus
on the actual experience being designed
• Documents are stripped down to their bare
components, providing the minimum amount of
information necessary to get started on
implementation
• Work on hypotheses that are going to be tested,
rather than solutions that are going to be sold
• Focus on making the right product before making
the product perfect (cf. Minimum Viable Product)
• Short, iterative, low-fidelity design cycles
• Collaboration, not command
Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.

7. (Lean UX) Process
• Figure out who it’s for?
• Interviews, personas, design target
• What can the user do that wasn’t possible before?
• Activity map, concept drawings, storyboards
• What features does the user need for that?
• Stickys, whiteboarding
• User’s needs + features > How do they fit
together?
• Sketch it, (prototype it), then build it
• “Fake it, then make it”
Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.

8. Why Agile or Lean?
• Startup innovates in a context of uncertainty.
There’s insufficient evidence to confidently answer
questions like will people want this kind of
product? Will people buy it? What should it look
like? What features should it have?
• Because of the uncertainty, progress is measured
by what we learn through experiments. Product
success is found through repeated cycles of
“build-measure-learn”
• Work is organized into the smallest possible batch
size and launched quickly -> Agile
Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.

9. Shared Goals
Agile development and Lean UX share a few
goals:
• Shorten the time to market
• Working software over comprehensive
documentation
• Collaboration over negotiation
• Responding to change over following a
plan
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10. Challenges
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11. How Can We Improve Our
Process?
• The design work we do is often limited to on-
the-go type of decisions
• We allow only a limited amount of time for
design
• Because of that, it’s more difficult to develop,
protect, and nurture patterns in our design
• We struggle with approvals
• We don’t have an established process that
involves UXD, thus our scenario is not “going
from traditional UX to lean”, but rather,
“establishing our approach to UXD”
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12. Problem vs. Solution
“Focus on the problem. If you’re only excited
about the solution, you’ll lose interest when
your solution doesn’t fix the problem.”
- Adil Wali, CTO of ModCloth
Development focuses on the solution.
UX design focuses on the problem.
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13. Developer ≠ Designer
• The people who make things pretty is a
different breed than the people who make
things work
• A UX designer’s role is somewhere in the
middle
Company confidential. Do not copy or distribute.

14. Integrating Design into Our
Development Process
The “Traditional” Way The Collaborative Way
(Waterfall + Waterfall or Waterfall + Agile) (Lean UX + Agile Development)
1. Have a great idea 1. Have a great idea
2. Wireframe 2. Wireframe
3. Designer creates a static 3. Engage devs to build a
mockup prototype
4. Static mockup is thrown 4. Play, tweak, rinse, repeat
to devs to implement 5. Once UX is nailed have
a designer polish to
perfection
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15. The Benefits
• Designer’s time is not lost on features that
aren’t shippable
• Timelines will not be disrupted by
unforeseen technical hurdles
• Devs get to sit at the same table with
designers
• Both design and development cycles
remain as short as possible
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16. Thank You
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