Category: UCD process

Who is the customer in Agile UCD?

Leisa Reichelt13 Comments

Have you read the Agile Manifesto lately? If you’re doing Agile work then hopefully you’ve come across it. I always find it a really good touchpoint to come back to when thinking about what *is* and *isn’t* Agile – much more useful than looking at how any one particular flavour of Agile or one companies interpretation of a flavour of agile can be!

At any rate, here’s a refresher. The Agile Manifesto says:

We are uncovering better ways of developingsoftware by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Seems almost straightforward, doesn’t it :) Deceivingly so, of course. There’s all kinds of complexity wrapped up in that simple manifesto, some of which we touched on recently and which requires so much more exploration.

Add in the UCD (User Centred Design) aspects and the questions only multiply!

Let’s start with this really easy one – who is the ‘customer’ in Agile UCD?

I would hazard a guess that your response would depend on whether you’ve been doing more Agile or more UCD lately.

If you’ve been doing lots of Agile lately, your answer would quite likely be that the ‘customer’ is the person who is paying the bills. The company or department who has commissioned the work that you’re undertaking. And that, as such, they essentially get a seat at the table as the development goes on, to have their input as decisions are being made minute to minute, and to request changes as they see fit. With any luck, this person is actually a real decision maker within their organisation and their input won’t be completely over-ridden as soon as your work is presented to the wider client team.

If you’ve been doing lots of UCD lately, then your response will probably be quite different. You’ll probably be thinking that ‘customer’ means ‘end user’ – the people who will ultimately end up as the beneficiaries of all your hard work. The people who you’re observing in order to generate your design work and who’s needs and characteristics are influencing decisions about the product functionality.

They’re two very different types of customers, aren’t they. With very different demands and expectations and requirements of you as a designer or developer of a product.

So, what to do?

Well, frankly, in Agile UCD, you need *both* of these types of customers. A successful project takes into account both the business requirements and the user requirements and having direct input from both sources directly is incredibly valuable.

Is it really necessary and valuable to have a member of your ‘client’ (which is what we’ll call the people who pay the invoices you send for this work) as a part of your day to day project team? I don’t think so. I think that ‘clients’ should be highly involved at the beginning and end of each iteration/sprint and on call throughout this time, but I don’t think that either the project team or the client gets much out of them having a permanent seat on the development team. I’d much rather see the team being left to get the work done and the client doing whatever it is they do best – which is very rarely being part of a design or development team. (Hands up if you think I just committed some kind of Agile heresy?)
On the other hand, one of the key reasons for moving Agile to Agile UCD is to add in involvement from actual end users. Traditional flavours of Agile simply haven’t allowed for the type of observation that we do in UCD and that serves us so well as designers to be included in the Agile process. This is why we are seeking to building in scope for contextual research and usability testing activities as iterations occur – rather than just at the very beginning of the project and at the very end.

So, in fact, there are two ‘customers’ in Agile UCD – but perhaps we’re better calling them the ‘client’ and the ‘end user’. One of the challenges of working out how Agile UCD should work is to determine the best way to involve each of these parties in our cycles of work so that we get the best from them and they give us the information and insight we need to do the best work we can.

You’ve seen some of my ideas about how this might work… what are your thoughts, ideas and experiences?

dConstruct – Questions on Agile UCD

Leisa Reichelt14 Comments

AgileUCDCycle

I had the opportunity to present a talk on the power of iterative methodologies over waterfall at dConstruct last week (a.k.a Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good). This is an extended re-mix of a talk that I gave very briefly at the IA Summit earlier this year (I also presented a similar talk at UX Week recently).

I will put my slides up as soon as I can get the file size low enough to get them loaded on SlideShare – will need to get in and optimise those post-it note photos I’m afraid! In the meanwhile, here’s the slide that most people have expressed interest in!

Not to make any excuses, but this is a really tricky talk to give. To get to the meaty bit – the bit where the UCD and the Agile come together, requires a base understanding that Waterfall methodologies (or sequential methodologies) suck, and that iterative and incremental and collaborative/cross-disciplinary methodologies are the way forward. It also requires that you have a working knowledge of Agile.

Lots of people assume that everyone has both of these things, but I can assure you they don’t. If everyone *knew* this, then there’d *be* no waterfall shops out there, right?!

Nonetheless, the most interesting part of this talk is getting down to tin tacks on HOW we can give Agile more UCD flavour – to actually integrated UX activities into a sustainable agile pattern. And this can be pretty tough.

I have to say that while I’m 100% committed to the overall idea of Agile UCD being the methodology of choice, I’m more or less committed to some of the assertions I made in my talk… (is this naughty? I just wanted to take a position for the sake of conversation, and I had plenty of those post-talk!)

For example – one of the things I said was that I think that Agile cycles (or sprints or whatever you call them where you are) need to be longer than 2 weeks. That it takes that much time to fit UX activities into a cycle. I *think* I believe that this is true, if you’re going to do solid UX work in an Agile environment as well as be there in a ‘paired’ environment getting the functionality built. More than one person suggested to me later that perhaps the same end could be achieved by just doing less in a two week sprint. Perhaps.

I don’t think there are any clear rules on this yet… at the end of the day, what I *do* want from this discussion is for UX practitioners to feel comfortable engaging in the discussion about how long a cycle should be with the rest of the Agile team and to not back away from the discussion when rebuffed with a simple ‘well, that’s the rules’, or ‘that’s just the way Agile works’ argument. Again – if your team doesn’t do this then consider yourself fortunate. There are lots of designers out there trying to eek their way into an established Agile environment who come up against this kind of resistance all the time.

There was another series of questions that I got from LOTS of people – and a very valid and important questions they are too…. I’m not sure I have the best responses so I’d love to get feedback from you on what you’d do and say.

The questions are around how do we sell Agile UCD to our organisation and to our clients? How do we manage the fact that this agile approach takes away the security blanket of knowing what you’ll get and when you’ll get it that Waterfall apparently provides.

When I was talking with people about this at dConstruct, I found myself saying these two things repeatedly, and it seemed to elicit nods and smiles and general agreement/enthusiasm.

The first is that whilst in waterfall you might know what you’re getting at the beginning – you have no reason for confidence that you are getting the *right* thing at the end of the process. And, in Waterfall, there’s no real mechanism for changing your mind or learning from the project itself as you go. You can very easily end up with the wrong thing, and then spend a whole bunch of time and money changing everything around so that it’s right – and you’re changing things at the most difficult (read: most expensive) time to be changing things!

So, what this means is that the ‘security’ that Waterfall appears to offer is really, in many cases, false. And although the budget for the project may be fixed at ‘x’ – no one knows what work will be required once the project is completed to get it into it’s correct state. Or the cost to the business of not having got the project as good as it could have been.

Make sense?

The second point is that we can ‘charge out’ Agile in a very different way to Waterfall. Although it would be nice, your client doesn’t *need* to commit to months and months of development work in an Agile environment. They don’t need to commit to the full budget. In fact, they *could* potentially just commit from cycle to cycle. Your company/department can calculate the cost of a cycle, then with the client, negotiate what work will be undertaken in that cycle… rinse, repeat etc.

Of course, this is not really the ideal way to be running a business and you’d hope that, over time, as your clients got more and more clued to the benefits of working Agile rather than Waterfall, they’d be more willing to make longer commitments to the project, making your cash flow a little less precarious!

Fact is though, you do need clients who are clued into the benefits of Agile and Agile UCD for their projects. If they don’t get what’s in it for them (and there is plenty!) then there’s no way you’ll sell them on it. So, knowing those reasons yourself and then educating your clients is a big part of the process.

It’s not easy though, and we’re not going to be in a state where we can be all happily Agile UCDing tomorrow, next week or even next month.

It is, however, without a doubt the ideal way to run your projects. It’s going to require a lot of thought, a lot of work, a lot of trying things out, and a lot of educating our clients and other people in our organisations.

I think it’s going to be worth the effort!

In the meanwhile, lets start sharing ideas and experiences.

How would *you* answer these questions? What questions do you have? What’s been your experience with Agile and Agile UCD?

dConstruct – Collaboration, Creativity & Consensus In User Experience Design Workshop

Leisa Reichelt3 Comments

Workshop in Action

I ran a workshop on Collaboration, Creativity & Consensus for User Experience Design at dConstruct last week. I had lots of fun and learned a lot as well – I know, it makes me sound as though I was a participant, not running the show! Funny how that works! (Hopefully the people who came along also had fun and learned stuff, then we’re all happy! I think they did.)

Finding good ways to collaborate and to work with a multi-disciplinary team is something that is very important to me. It makes the work much more fun and gives so much more insight.

I was really interested in the short discussion we had in our workshop about the importance of fun in project work. There was more or less a consensus amongst us that fun was more than just, well, fun. It was also really important in motivating the team to stay engaged with the project and to do great work, and to be involved. And lots more reasons. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on if and if so why fun is important in project work.

We did three exercises throughout the course of the day including a brainstorming session with a difference (brainstorming that actually works and doesn’t deserve the bad reputation that bad brainstorming has given it!), a round of design consequences (which we’ve talked about here before), and a run through the KJ Method (whilst channeling Jared Spool).

Something that became clearer to me than ever is the importance of actually *doing* these exercises in order to learn them, and how incredibly hardwired our brains can be to doing things the way we’re used to.

This was never more evident than when we did the brainstorming exercise. I gave some pretty simple instructions to the groups before letting them loose on the brainstorming activity. Admittedly, they were probably fairly different instructions to what everyone was used to when it came to brainstorming, but what followed was pretty extraordinary.

Rather than following these simple instructions, three of the four groups did their own thing, which turned out to be more or less the same thing – rather than using the techniques we’d discussed which are designed to open out the idea generation process, they each proceeded to ‘lock down’ the process by creating a list of things that the device (oh, ok, it was an iPhone!) could do and not do. There was this driving need to ‘lock down’ the environment in which the ideas could be generated. This is not particularly conducive to productive brainstorming!

As it happened, what this meant was that I had to go around to each group and suggest to them that, just for fun, they gave the rules we’d discussed a go – and when they did, the creativity and ideas started flowing! It was a real insight not only into the power of brainstorming well, but also into our own natural desire to get a handle on things, to keep things tight, even when this is potentially detrimental to the activity we’re trying to undertake. I’m pretty sure with out actually seeing this in action, experiencing it for yourself, the lesson is nowhere near as powerful!

There were some really challenging questions raised during the workshop, some of which I’m sure I don’t know the answer to yet (if there is one!). A lot of these were related to how we can bring these kinds of collaborative and creative activities into a workplace that doesn’t naturally embrace them – or worse, where these kinds of activities are looked on as ‘not real work’, or where people pride themselves on working independently.

This can definitely be a tough situation, and I guess my first tip would be to try to make sure you work in a place where collaborative and creative work is embraced! This is going to work for everyone though, so some of the tips that I offer include:

  • Be brave. Those people who think that collaborative and fun activities are childs play and don’t contribute meaningfully to ‘proper work’ often have a talent for making you feel a little silly for suggesting these activities. Don’t let this put you off – press on regardless and have confidence in your techniques!
  • Be methodical. It is actually pretty easy to waste time on these kinds of activities… this is probably why lots of people are pretty cynical about them – they’ve had their time wasted before. Make sure you know WHY you are doing this activity, and WHAT you’re going to get out of it. If it has a clear purpose and outcome then it is more likely to be successful and people are more likely to give it a go.
  • Be prepared. These activities don’t run themselves and most of them require some time, effort and careful thinking to ensure that they are well prepared and run smoothly. Don’t expect to just ‘wing it’ in these sessions. Don’t risk wasting people’s time. Make sure you know what you’re going to do. If you haven’t done it before, consider running a pilot run through before the ‘live’ workshop. Have your shit together.
  • Let your work speak for itself. The absolute best thing you can do is to run a highly productive and fun workshop in your organisation and to let the work speak for itself. People enjoy themselves in these sessions – if they feel like they’re getting good results, then they’re even happier. Word will spread and resistance should gradually die down. If it doesn’t… change jobs! :)

Thanks to everyone who participated in the workshop! With any luck I’ll get a chance to do some more of these in the near future – they’re lots of fun and give you some really great tools for bringing your team and maybe even your organisation together around a project.

Embracing the Un-Science of Qualitative Research Part Three – Improvising is Excellent

Leisa Reichelt4 Comments

So, recently we’ve been talking about Qualitative Research and how it’s not so scientific, but that ain’t bad.

We identified three ways that you *might* make Qualitative Research more scientific and have been pulling those approaches apart. They are to:

  1. Use a relatively large sample size (which we destroyed here)
  2. Ensure that your test environment doesn’t change (which was shown to be foolish here)
  3. Ensure that your test approach doesn’t change (which we’ll take down now).

So, one of the first things you learn when you come to qualitative research, particularly usability testing, is to write a test script. A test script is good because you’ll be spending an hour or so with each person and you need to have something to prompt you to make sure you cover what you need to cover, and to help ensure you have a good structure to your session.

But this is how scripts are supposed to be used – as a guide. You shouldn’t literally use them as a script! And you should feel confident and comfortable deviating from the script at the right times.

When are the right times to deviate from the script? I think there are two key times.

If you already know what the answer to your question will be, there is very little reason to ask it. Sometimes it is helpful to have an array of people responding in the same way to the same task or question – particularly if your client is particularly attached to a bad idea for some reason. Repetition can help bring them around. Most of the time, though, you’re just wasting valuable research time covering old ground when you could be covering new.

Very often it’s not until the first one or two research sessions that some very obvious issues become very obvious. You wonder why you didn’t pick them up before, but that’s why we do this kind of testing/research. If you’re not updating your prototype (as recommended in Part Two), then you should update your script. Don’t cover old ground for no good reason, research time is too valuable for that.

The other main reason for deviating from the script is if the person you’re interviewing says or does something really interesting. Your script tries to anticipate what people’s reactions might be, to a point – but the point of doing this research is to learn things you didn’t know before, and sometimes what you thought you’d find and what you actually find are very distant from one another – and this is great! This means you’re doing good research. (It’s alarmingly easy to find out the answers you want to find out by researching poorly).

If you’re interviewing someone and they say something interesting and perhaps unexpected – follow it! This is potentially research gold. Don’t let sticking to a script stop you from following this gold. You may, in fact, want to alter your script for future interviews depending on what you discover here.

Of course, this means that when it comes time to do your report you won’t be able to say things like ‘80% of people said this’ or ‘only 10% of people did that’. People do like to say those kinds of things in their reports and, of course, clients tend to like to hear them. People like numbers. (Just think of how they latch on to stupid concepts like the ‘3 click rule’). But you shouldn’t really be using numbers like this in your reporting anyways. After all – as we talked about in part one – you’re not using statistically significant numbers anyway, you’re probably talking about eight, maybe twelve people. Your percentages, no matter how popular, are not particularly meaningful AND you are helping to fuel the perception that research is about numbers like this when, as we agreed earlier, it is really all about the depth of insight and qualitative research is what you do if you want to pull out fancy percentages.

So, write yourself a script and use it for inspiration and reminders and for structure but don’t be constrained by it and do let the content of your interview guide the questions you ask and what you report.

Which makes me think… perhaps we need to talk some about how to ask good questions whilst interviewing… soon, I think.

(Brief apologies for the delay between parts 2 and 3 – I had to do some holidaying in Italy. Briefly back in London before flying out to UX Week tomorrow morning. Are you having a ridiculously busy August too?!)