Selling User Experience

to Coders

Maarit Laanti

28-Oct-2014

Maarit Laanti

• 20 years in various product development roles at Nokia, 6 years in

agile & lean transformation / organizational development

– Product development for various products and platforms

– Coached and trained hundreds of practitioners

in agile methods deployment

• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Program Consultant at Nitor Delta

• PhD — “Agile Methods in Large-Scale Software Development

Organizations – Applicability and Model for Adoption” (2013)

• Keynote speaker at XP2014 / Rome

My claims in this presentation

1. Here is a built-in-tension between UX design and development

2. Agile forgot UX from the start

3. Agile (re)discovered UX (Apple proved you can sell designed products with higher price)

4. There are (proven) ways to do better

5. Collective embarrassment is the best tool available

”Let’s ADD Sprint #13 for it!”

Complex UI – simple code – simple UI complex code?

Design is an iterative process

• Great UX is created with iterations! • Do we also need a Steve Jobs to say no?

Agile development?

Agile means you just have a bunch of coders and the customer sitting in middle

of them

Give me your UI

spec and we

will implem

ent it

This is how we sell agile

VersionOne study 2008Improve

d

Significantly

Improved

Enhanced ability to

manage changing

priorities

41% 51%

Improved project visibility 42% 41%

Improved alignment of IT

and business goals39% 27%

Reduced project risk 48% 17%

Agile delivers projects on time and budget

The value of incremental delivery

ROI of

traditional

project

Brake-even

ROI of

agile project

Benefits:

• Faster feedback enables faster

learning – enabling right focus /

right change of focus

• Smaller increments lessens

project complexity

• Earlier brake-even point / ROI

• Partial deliveries equal to

smaller risks – fail safely;

execute gloriously

With Minimum Marketable Release

approach we can gain faster time-to-

market and time-to-profit

Single release approach means

slower time-to-market and time-

to-profit

Boss’s Wife

This time we do the UX properly…

We test every iteration with real users!

The current tests shows that our customer segment is going to love this product!

I gave the proto to my wife, but she did not like it.

I’d say we cancel this product.

Project on time and budget can be an epic failure!

NPS -20

Measuring the customer value

Lean metrics for services

• Utilization rate

• How fast the service is

• How accurate the service is

• How many errors does take

place when delivering the

service

Customer satisfaction

• Would you recommend this

service to your friends? (Net

Promoter Score, NPS)

Why this is important? Be the top dog!

With the lean startup we are getting there….

Back to the roots of agile.

Cockburn:

Software Development is a Co-operative Game

Co-creation. Groups are

faster solving problems

than individuals. Let the

software evolve together,

as the sum of the whole

is more than its parts. Co-evolution

UXArch

Feedback

Synergistic view

An extended team – same team or different team?

Same team

• UX design and developers

need to talk with each other –

UX designers need to see how

the designs can be

implemented; development

needs to get latest design &

sketches

• Co-evolution leads to best

results. More than a school

bus length and it does not

matter if you are on the same

building or not

Different team

• UX design / development is

essentially a different kind of

discipline; needs to have its own

iterations

• Need to develop UX design

skills

• Common look and feel

• UX Definition of done?

• Common style guide and

component library

• Usability tests are not on a team

level in any bigger organization

How IUX designers and developers are seeing each

other…

UX Designer Developer

…as extremes….

Hippie Code troll

....but in reality we are all artists, and we should treat

ach other as artists!

Computer-assisted

graphical designer Computer scientist

A joined kanban-wall

• Same team or two teams sitting

next to each other

• A joined wall where both

iterations are made visible

• A visual management tool for

both

ConceptingDelivery

Ideas UX-design Coding DeliveryValidation

What needs to be measured? NPS?

• Compare the current version the current demo with competitor version / demo

• For each Feature, define the ambition level for this iteration

– Minimum

– Median

– Maximum

• What are the basics that always needs to be there?

• What are ways to differentiate from competitors?

• What is the customer segment? Friendly users / focus group?

Why it is hard to be one team

Disney’s creative process

• “Get me something to

implement” – mentality

• “What is the difference

between these two colors?”

• “Can’t we just add another

button?”

The power of collective embarrassment

Rules of the game:

- Force to see misuse cases

real, frank and honest

feedback

- No blame game

- Trust that everyone wants to

do their best

Why it is hard to be one team – the critique

Thou shall not critique an un-finished work

Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. Creativity has to start somewhere, and we

are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process--reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed

story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.

Lean startups vs. set-based design?

Point-based

Set-based

Pick one

Pick many

Make it work

Pick many againChoose the best

Set-based design with focus groups

Set-based design iterations combined with set-based design and friendly focus groups

Case F-secure Lokki

Thanks!

A nerd on the journey to find her inner artist

KETTERÄMUUTOS

ASIAKAS-

KOKEMUKSEN

SUUNNITTELU

Nitor

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TOIMITUS

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