Practice Agile Design Process — Design Thinking + Agile Approach
Use Design Thinking as an overall guide to align with a product’s strategy, meanwhile practice Agile methodology for daily design activity.
Agile methodology has been adopted widely for software development in a big corporation. This movement forces UX/UI designers to change their design process from traditional Waterfall to Agile. With Agile development, we can work along with the engineering team to design, develop, test an application more efficiently. To get these benefits of Agile development, UX/UI designers need a new working process that we can rely on daily to think and create. Let us try to define this new Agile.
Design Thinking Process
Stanford’s d.school five-stage Design Thinking model addresses three group of design actions as following:
- UX Research — Learn and understand the problem, people needs, then define the problem
- Concept Design — Discover all possible options to solve the problem
- Detail Design — Iterate through trying, testing and refining selected options
The UX RESEARCH phase aligns with the “Empathize & Define” mode for Design Thinking. At this design phase, we are aiming to define the right problem for the product via UX research. According to Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF)
UX (user experience) research is the systematic study of target users and their requirements, to add realistic contexts and insights to design processes, to uncover problems and design opportunities. Doing so, we can reveal valuable information which can be fed into the design process.
To empathize, we gain a better understanding of who are our users, their physical and emotional needs, their working habits, and their behavior. Once we gain a good knowledge of users and the problem, we need to bring clarity and focus to the design space. As a team, we need to write a clear definition of the problem that needs to be solved, and everyone is on the same page. The goal of this phase are:
- understand and define users needs
- define product features from the product owners point of view
- understand the design challenge
- understand and define product scope
The CONCEPT DESIGN phase aligns with the “Ideate & Prototype” mode for Design Thinking. Here, we are focusing on finding the right design solution which will solve the problem that is defined in the UX RESEARCH phase. This can be achieved by doing multiple rounds of “think outside the box” exercises to generate as many ideas/concepts as possible. Then sketch a quick prototype to test it against the well-defined problem. By doing with a few rounds, we can reduce the number of ideas and focus on the most likely solutions.
The DETAIL DESIGN phase aligns with the “Prototype & Test” mode for Design Thinking. After the concept is proved, requirements are fully understood, we can start the “DETAIL DESIGN” phase to mockup all UI pages to cover every single use case. Then we can conduct user testing sessions with those mockups, get user feedback, change/redefine mockup per feedback. By doing this, we can generate UI pages that are usable, useful, and desirable.
Agile Development approach
Now, let us take a close look of Agile Development Approach as a UX/UI designer. Here is the paragraph of “What is Agile?” on Atlassian.com
Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.
Iterative, consumable and increments are the key factors for an Agile approach. And those three key factors are incorporated into six Agile Development activities as illustrated in the diagram above. Let us try to practice each activity that correspondent with those three groups of design actions we discussed earlier.
Meet & Plan: various design activities can happen while doing these two Agile ones. At beginning of a new product design, we will conduct UX research work such as user interview sessions, UX expert review of existing or a competitor’s product. After the right problem and product major features are defined, we can carve out a release plan. Last, we can divide design work into consumable (manageable) pieces for each feature at beginning of each agile sprint. The goal of Meet & Plan is to make sure that we align with the product strategy, we iterate design work to deliver the best solution.
Design: the primary design activities are to ideate and produce UX prototypes. Designers work along with developers to find a design prototype that not only fulfills the product feature but also easy to use. Similar to Meet & Plan activities, the scope of this one can be major or minor based on whether we are at the very beginning of the project, or in the middle of developing features. When we start to create a new product or function/feature, we spend more time on concept design to form a clear understanding of the overall user flow; identify key screens and their layout; design-style guide.
Develop: for this Agile activity, designers focus on expand concept design into detail screens. Designers iterate detail design of UI screens to cover every use case. Designers also work along with developers to improve the detail design.
Test: if time and money allowed, designers and UX researchers can conduct some usability tests to identify and eliminate any usability problems. If not, we can do some rudimental usability testing in the form of design review with teammates, such as product managers, developers, designers who don’t work on this product, etc. Additionally, the developed feature will be tested via QA team as part of Agile process.
Evaluate: this activity is aiming to get feedback from the business owner and stakeholders. And refine the detail design as needed.
To summarize, we can map Agile activities, design actions, and design thinking as below,
