Making Agile development and UX work at Citizens AdviceAdrian Hunt, Publishing Manager, Citizens Advice

First time agile

What I am going to talk about

Why Citizens Advice chose an agile development philosophy to develop their new CMS and inform their digital strategy

How user testing has informed that development

The lessons learnt – plus points and drawbacks

but first ...

This is a picture of the 1.8 million people who attended Barack Obama’s first inauguration as US President.

That’s roughly how many people walk through our doors each year

Twice as many ring us

Nine times as many use our websites

A well performing website but...

Citizens Advice’s advice website has seen traffic consistently increase over the past five years. Last year was its most successful ever with nearly 16 million unique visitors. However it is built on a creaking,15-year-old CMS.

Vince Cable saves the day

In March 2013, Citizens Advice was awarded additional funding to develop their online offering, some of which was allocated to a new CMS, a refresh of our website design and the development of a new digital strategy.

Scope of the project

Technical – Replacing a content management system and developing new functionality

Data – Migrating the content of six existing websites

Information architecture – All sites on a single domain with some sites merging

Design – Refreshing existing and introducing responsive design

Workflow – Changing the editorial model of intranet to include workflow

Commercial – Setting up a web subscription service for one of our websites

and ...

Agile project management

Following disappointing experiences in previous ICT projects, we decided to develop the new CMS using Agile principles. This decision was made before any CMS had been chosen. It was an experiment and the first time it had been adopted at Citizens Advice.

After a procurement exercise, the EPiServer CMS was chosen with Sigma as the developer. One of the particularly convincing arguments that Sigma had made was the emphasis they placed on user experience and continual user testing within the development cycle.

Why Agile: Key differences

Agile against traditional development

Pros Early visibility of developments

Changing priority of features easy

Changing order of releases easy

Testing done throughout

Cons Requires a lot of time

Almost dedicated input from business owners

Lots of testing needed

Our Agile approach

Story – item/feature to develop Backlog – prioritised list of items to develop

Sprint – 2 week mini development cycle taking top items from the backlog, developing and testing them before presenting them-

Showcase – Where developed stories are presented. They are then tested against the specification

Each story costs a certain number of points

Each sprint contains a max of 120 pts = velocity

Intention: early and continuous visibility of development

Agile – Sprint meetings

Week 1

SPM

Week 2“Sprint”

ShowcaseLook

AheadWeek 1

SPM

Week 2“Sprint”

ShowcaseLook

AheadWeek 1

SPM

Week 2“Sprint”

ShowcaseLook

AheadWeek 1

SPM

Week 2“Sprint”

ShowcaseLook

AheadWeek 1

SPM

Week 2“Sprint”

ShowcaseLook

AheadWeek 1

SPM

Week 2“Sprint”

ShowcaseLook

AheadWeek 1

SPM

Week 2“Sprint”

ShowcaseLook

AheadWeek 1

SPM

Week 2“Sprint”

ShowcaseLook

Ahead

Release

Sprints

SPMLook

AheadShowcase

Week 1 Week 2

Intended velocity

July August September October November December January February March

BMIS CABlink Adviceguide

BMIS

CABlink

Corp

Adviceguide

Advisernet

AdvisernetCorp

User experience approach

At the outset of the project, we had the goal to test new ideas, designs and functionality with users and place each site in a beta version prior to rollout…

Feedback was gathered through a variety of techniques, including: Workshops and focus groups Interviews, surveys and questionnaires Natural environment observation User testing (remote and observed, guerrilla) Analytics Website feedback mechanisms

Where UX counted

Benchmarking of existing sites

Template design

Paper prototyping

Strategic goals

Internal stakeholder requirements

Key external stakeholder requirements

Accessibility reviews at each site launch

Beta testing of the internal sites, BMIS and CABlink

200 Citizens Advice super testers recruited

Two focus groups representing the public and power

Agile and UX in action

My sketch of a section start page with the different types of feature

Agile and UX in action (idea generation)

First draft of the design of the section start page in Photoshop

Agile and UX in action (design 1)

Agreed design of the section start page in Photoshop

Agile and UX in action (iteration of design)

Functionality specified and uploaded onto project tool, Trello

Agile and UX in action (specification)

Testing of functionality by Citizens Advice, comments and findings recorded on Trello

Agile and UX in action (staging)

Agile and UX in action (live)

The home page of one of our intranet sites, CABlink, which is built from interchangeable blocks developed for the start pages of other sites

Milestones: Where are we now

Sep 2013: Presentation to Annual Conference

Oct – Dec 2013: BMIS beta

Jan 2014: BMIS live

Feb – Mar 2014: CABlink beta

Apr 2014: CABlink live

Jun 2014: Last two development sprints planned

Early Sep 2014: AdviserNet launch planned-

Mid Sep 2014: Corporate and Adviceguide sites merged and new citizensadvice.org.uk launched

Autumn – Winter 2014: UX review of sites

Lessons: Agile

Exhausting – get the velocity right

Testing resource

Bugs – with complexity comes bugs

Specifications are still required

Tracking of progress essential

More stabilisation sprints

There is built-in redundancy

Co-location helpful, though not essential

Lessons: Project specific

Make sure you have real content in the CMS on which to develop

Know the technology – as the client you will be specifying and testing

Think design/templates and then develop functionality

More UX

Second staff full time

Was a shift-and-lift migration project suitable for agile development?

Successes

More client involvement in development

Don’t go too far wrong

Continuous redefinition / iteration

Constant reprioritisation of stories

Encourages you to test with users

You get better at it as the project progresses

Better product as an end result

The future

Agile is now being rolled out to other projects and areas of Citizens Advice

On the websites, we are adopting Agile and user needs wholesale as a

means of producing and reviewing content and tools

User experience is central to our future content strategy

Testing resource is recognised as an essential component to any

development

Thank you and questions

My name is Adrian Hunt.

I am Publishing Manager at Citizens Advice.

I can be contacted at:

adrian.hunt@citizensadvice.org.uk or

adrhunt@googlemail.com