Enterprise agile transformation: UX leadership

Summary: Is your company going through an agile transformation. In January 2016, the product/development team and I where sent to a 6 month full-time training engagement to bring agile transformation to our product team and enterprise. I think it is time that I write about it. Here are some things you should consider while starting or going through your agile transformation. 

Stage of transformation
I have observed 4 stages of transformation. 

  1. Training
  2. Team integration
  3. Plateau
  4. Enterprise integration

Training:
Choose a product and IT team that works on a product that can quickly show business and customer experience (CX) results. Pick a vendor to send your entire team off site to learn the agile and lean UX process. The vendor should be an industry leader in training organizations to transform from waterfall to agile and at integrating lean UX research and design into that process. You should work on your actually product while off site. Lastly, look for small wins and ways you can quickly demonstrate how the agile process will accomplish business goals and improve customer experience at a faster rate. 

Team integration:
Your team will come back after 4-6 months to your organization. The team will have push through. This will cause conflict while working with other waterfall teams but embrace it. Figure our a process of working with waterfall teams and still with it. Pick and choose your battles. Use your political capitol wisely and little by little. Don't be surprised if some of your team members use all their political, get burned out and leave the company for new opportunities elsewhere. Transformation is a tiring tasks but rewarding work.

Plateau:
Around 2 years in, your single product team that you chose to start the transformation will be full agile. The problem now is they have to work with waterfall teams. The good news is that business leaders across the company will see your teams success and push other IT and product teams to go agile. 

Enterprise integration:
At the 3 year mark, other IT and product teams within the enterprise should start making real process changes to transform from waterfall to agile. This will be hard for them and will take each team 3-5 years to transform to a full agile process. If you are an executive at a company, here is what you can do to move your enterprise forward. 1.) Pair up waterfall team members with agile team members. 2.) Guide each team to start with projects that are low risk and have high business and CX impact. 3.) When agile seems to fail the company, don't give up, back up your team and the process with senior leaders/executives in your enterprise and help your team learn and grow with each failure.

UX Leadership: Collaborating with non-UX teams

Talk about how each team can contribute to the other

Keep the conversation a safe place to state when and how each team can help each other. Equally important, keep it a safe place to communicate to each team in which situations we want to avoid getting in the way of each others work. Think about it, if other teams were involved in every part of the UX process, it would significantly slow the work down to the point where company results would suffer.  

Define the goals of collaborating together in the first few planning meetings. Communicate these goals every month to keep everyone on track. 

Here are some examples of goals for collaborating with non-UX teams:

  • Help non-UX teams have more empathy and understand user needs by sitting in on Usability sessions. This will also help other teams buy into to what your UX team is doing. 
  • To keep other teams informed about what will be in each release so others teams that take customer service calls or help customers in other ways don’t get thrown off guard when interacting with customers. In other words, to keep non-UX teams informed so they don’t get caught off guard by something that may affect their work. Your non-UX teams will love your UX team for keeping them informed on what customer will see in each release. No one likes to be unpleasantly surprised. 

Involve them in the UX research process

Include them to observe usability session and help take notes. All companies need employees who are in touch with their customers thought processes, needs and goals. Your senior leaders will see your UX team as a team that helps other teams be more customer-centric. I have found that business partners in all departments enjoy listening in and watching usability sessions. For remote team collaboration, explain how you take the data from each research study to synthesis them into insights and how you incorporate the insights into your UX flows and designs. Don’t let them sit over your shoulder while you synthesis the research, create research reports or update the designs, but give them an idea of how it is done. Set exactions that the other teams will have to learn the UX process as they go and that your UX team does not have time to train them on every part of the UX process. For teams that are located in the same building, you can take notes on sticky notes and categorize them into groups to create UX insights together.

Your UX team should communicate to non-UX teams how they can contribute to the UX process

Your business partners can help your UX team know the customer and business scenarios that need to be considered in the design. Also, your IT partners can help you understand what data is available and what is technically feasible. I can’t tell you how many times business scenarios come up over the course of a project. Tell your business partners to help gather the scenarios up front, organize them and share the with your UX team as early in the project as possible. 

Create a process of at what points in the UX process others teams will be involved

Put together a simple UX process and highlight the parts that you will collaborate with non-UX teams. Don’t over document this but define at what parts of the process where other teams will be involved and which parts the UX team will work on without interruption. This will set expectations, build trust between the teams and minimize the friction between your UX team members and members of other teams.

UX Leadership #1: Team Building

Here are some patterns I have seen in my current role that have been effective in building our UX team.

shutterstock_352315130.jpg

1.  Make sure visual designers, UX/interaction designers and UX researchers collaborate together

Collaboration usually happens with a UX team when 2 people work together on a specific product, part of a product or project. The best collaboration happens when the 2 working together have different areas of focus. For example, one of your visual designers would work with one of your UX/interaction designers to help make user flows visual appealing, brand compliant and visually consistent with the rest of the brand. There should be little differences of opinion between them because each person should be seeing the product through a different perceptive. The visual designer is focused on the look and feel and the UX/interaction designer is focussed on the user flows, user interactions and how the user is consuming content. 

2.  Establish design principles, a style guide and UI kit

If your UX team knows what each element on the page should look like, what UI elements are used for what interactions and how the brand essence should feel to the end users, your team can focus more of their time on high value activities. High value activities might include conduction usability sessions, creating scenario maps, conducting design thinking activities and other activities that help create solutions for UX issues on the product. 

Also, working with developers and vendors will take less time. Vendors and developers will really appreciate you for supplying them with documents that will help them give you the product you desire. 

Host your design principles, style guide and UI kit in a shared space and make them easy to share with others.

How much of your team’s time is spent on figuring out how a drop down menu should look? Or on other similar, low value tasks?

3.  Create a UX process and UX research process and share it with everyone you can at your company

Creating and sharing documents like these can help build your reputation within an organization. Other teams will feel more comfortable working with you and your team. They will get a taste of what to expect before you work with them for the first time. 

You don’t have to use every part of your process on every project. However, giving everyone a process that contains all the tools in your tool box will make your team look experienced and well versed in the field of UX. 

Thanks for reading. Be blessed, be thankful and enjoy today!

Reducing Bias in your UX research

One great tip to reduce bias

Don't use words that are on your design UI or prototype. Participants will just match the keywords you give them with the exact same words on your website or prototype. 

For example: Your working on an insurance website where customers can manage their insurance. You want to test how easy it is for customers to find their Auto Insurance ID Cards that they put in their cars in case they get in an accident or get pulled over by the police. Do not say, "Show me how you would find and print your auto Insurance ID Card for your Jetta in a usability study" as the scenario for study. Instead say "Show me how you would find and print out the document you need as proof that you have Auto Insurance that you will put in your car in case you get in an accident or get pulled over by the police".

Personas - why we need them?

Personas help us answer the question - Who are we designing for?

People use products and services. If we don't know about the people who are using our products, we run the risk of designing things that they don't value. But if we really take the time to get to know our users, we can create personas to represent them. The product team can now use these personas to keep their real users or target users in mind. Thus we have a user-centered design process that utilized the power of empathy for our customers. 

A few tips for creating personas

1. Work with your Marketing team (If your company has one)

  • See if they have market research your target customer(s)
  • This is great place to start when choosing what types of people to recruit as participants in your persona development research

2. Create a prototype persona

  • Create a persona that is all your hypothesis about what this person is like
  • But don't use it yet. These are all educated guesses at this point

3. Create a prototype persona

  • Create a persona that is all your hypothesis about what this person is like
  • But don't use it yet. These are all educated guesses at this point

4. Base your persona on research

  • Ask open-ended question to participants so they can tell your stories about their past experiences
  • Exploratory UX research can be a good start
  • Usability test your current product if you have one
  • Talk to 7 - 10 participants to make your first persona

5. If 3 or more participants have the same behavior, challenge, goal, need, thought, pain points and mental model, those become research insights that you write into your persona

6. Your persona should include the following sections:

  • Name, demographics, income, career information, marital status
  • A behaviors section
  • A goals section
  • A challenges section

 

PersonaSketchExample

Panda Chrome Extension

Here is a great Chrome Extension called Panda to get inspiration and articles for designers, developers, product managers and product owners.


Link add the extension to your chrome browser. 


Link to find out more about it.

Card Sorts

When to do a card sort?

Research Insights can tell you what to research next. 


I was recently working on a client product. Where we found the 6 out of 10 participants and 2 out of 4 participants from 2 different usability studies were having trouble finding the link to get their task started. They would click around on all kinds of links hoping it would get them to their desired place so they can quickly finish their intended task.

This led me to believe we needed to understand how the majority of our users' mental models made them think about how tasks were grouped into categories and what they would name those categories. 

So this one use case where card sorts are effective. 

The card sort study was able to help us redesign the navigation for the client that matches the way users think about the tasks and categories. 


Green Field Products: Another use case for card sorts is more obvious. 


When your designing a new product from scratch that does not exist yet. It will be helpful to understand how users group and label categories of information so you know how to organize the information in the navigation and in the design itself. 


Examples of Research Insights


Research insights might show you that user group tasks based on how often they would do them (frequency), how urgent they are when they need them (importance) or just that they like grouping similar tasks together.  


Online Tool


I recommend using Optimal Sort. https://www.optimalworkshop.com/optimalsort

It was easy to use and it will only cost you $99 per study. 


Vanity Metrics - Don't be deceived by them

Stopping relying on Vanity Metrics to improve your digital product because you will be making uninformed decisions.

If your a UX designer and work for a large corporation or any company, you may have noticed the lack of quality analytics. Technical debt and legacy systems make it hard for companies to stop using Vanity Metrics.

What are vanity metrics?

Vanity metrics are numbers that don't track a conversion that makes your company money. Here are some examples:
  • Page views
  • Link clicks

Why are these vanity metrics?

  • These metrics don't tell us why customers are going to pages or clicking on links. For example, customer my click on links because they are looking for something and can't find it. 
  • If the links or button clicks your tracking are not the ones that make your company revenue on your website, why are you tracking them at all?
Business people please stop using Vanity Metrics. Leaders remove technical debt, legacy systems and processes that prevent your team from tracking actionable metrics that actually track flows and conversions on your digital product that produce revenue.


What should your analytics track?

They should track flows from where the user starts their journey to get to your digital product to what path they take step by step to do an action that makes your company money. 

Track the highest revenue conversions first, do qualitative 1 on 1 interviews and usability testing with participants so you can take that research and improve the conversions on your digital product that makes your company the most money.

Then move to less profitable conversions if you have time and budget for them. 

Defining the Happy Path for your software

It is always best to do 1-on-1 qualitative interviews and usability tests with your actual customers or with people who represent your customer persona(s) or that are your target persona(s). Find the common themes of behavior, mental model, needs and challenges. Then make a target persona out of the research. Your qualitative research and usability tests should define what the "Happy Path" is for each flow in your software application for your customers and your target customer(s) or persona(s).

Lean Hypothesis Writing

  1. We believe that...
  2. We will do/make...
  3. We will know if the hypothesis is valid if...

  • Qualitative Evidence
  • Quantitative Evidence

Example:
We believe that Tom (Tom is one of your personas) prefers to use his Social Security Number to authenticate his identity in order to register for his online banking app.

We will make a registration process prototype where Tom has several options to verify his identity in order to register for his banking app. One of those options should be SSN. We will do usability tests using our prototype with 5 participants who represent our target persona.

We will know if it is valid if Tom chooses to use his SSN instead of the other options presented to him to register for his banking app and communicates that he likes or prefers using his SSN.

Mental Models

What is a mental model?

First of all, why do mental models matter?

Creating something that is intuitive for your target persona or customer to use has to do with how well what you make matches their mental model. 

It is a representation or a picture that lives inside an individual of something in the real world. This representation or picture is the total of what a human being believes about a situation or object.

 

This includes, but is not limited to:

  • How something functions
  • How it is organized
  • Hearsay about the situation or object
  • All their experiences with the situation or object (even a similar situation or object)

Why do humans automatically make mental models of everything in life? Because if the model is accurate, it can save us time when deciding how to behave in life situations, events or how to use an object we need to accomplish a task.

Collaborative Sketching

Crazy 8’s Design Sketching

Product Owner, Product Manager, Designer and Developers do this activity together

Include your whole team in the design process to ensure everyone has their ideas heard and the team can make sure they have created the best design solutions for their target persona. 

 

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672917/the-8-steps-to-creating-a-great-storyboard

User Value vs. Feasibility

2 X 2 Prioritizing 

User Value vs. Feasibility

Product Owner, Product Manager, Developers and Designer do this activity together

Place your epics, user stories, features or user tasks on sticky notes and place them on this 2 x 2 prioritizing board. This will get you a quick visual snapshot of what you should work on that will have the greatest impact on your customers or potential customers and how much work your developers will have to do to accomplish that user value.

Interviewing Participants for Qualitative Research

Facilitating Temperament

  • Personable
  • Be Patient
  • A combination of sociability and self-awareness

Facilitating Skills

  • Warm the participant up with small talk
  • Then dispassionately observe the participant use the design with no idea what to do next
  • Self control not to intervene to help the participant with the task or lead them during the test
  • Explaining each scenario and task clearly to participants

When the Facilitator is the Designer, Product Manager, Developer, Product Owner or Stakeholder of the design being tested.

Be aware of whether the facilitator is:

  • able to sit there idly when the participant has trouble accomplishing a task or can’t accomplish it at all
  • able to not give small hints and leading questions to the participant during the session
  • able to avoid leading the participant
  • able to not help them when they get lost or stuck
  • able to embrace uncomfortable silences
  • able to listen to their own interview recording and give themselves constructive feedback
  • able to have other facilitators listen to their interview recordings and receive constructive feedback from them

User Value Vs Business Value

2 X 2 Prioritizing 

User Value vs. Business Value

Product Owner, Product Manager and Designer do this activity together

Place your epics, user stories, features or user tasks on sticky notes and place them on this 2 x 2 prioritizing board. This will get you a quick visual snapshot of what you should work on that will have the greatest impact on your customers or potential customers and drive the most business growth.