The role of UX in the SCRUM process
At Monogo, we are seeing an increased interest in User Experience topics. Most clients want to invest in creating the perfect user experience. Very often, however, we find that only leaders are aware of how the project team should function in order to realise the full potential of UX specialists. What is the difference between industry leaders and aspiring companies when it comes to the delivery process? How do you include UX in your organisation's scrum process? And finally - what do I gain by adding UX permanently to the scrum process? I will answer these questions in the content of the following article.
Designing mock-ups of functionality
Currently, scrum is used in around 56% of teams working in the IT sector. More than half of the teams will sooner or later face the challenge of adapting UX processes to the scrum framework. Why do I see this as a challenge? Having worked in the industry for more than 10 years, talking to other UX professionals, it is clear that it is now standard to have separate processes for the discovery and delivery phases. And there is strength in this, but only in the case of projects created completely from scratch, where we build a product from scratch and only in its initial phase. In any other case, this approach generates problems. Mock-ups are created in isolation from the technology, designers may not be aware of the technological limitations or the time needed to develop the designed functionalities, and developers are frustrated. They often lack someone on the team to explain the idea behind the author's design of the functionality. They cannot ask for changes resulting from the technical analysis to be made to the mock-ups, so in the end the mock-ups are more of an inspiration than the final product.
Where does the hard and natural division of the digital product development process into discovery and delivery phases come from? I don't have the research for this, but I can use my reflection. It's the legacy of the early days of the industry, where IT was heavily assisted by collaborating with digital agencies on mock-ups. The agency would do the discovery phase - persona, user journey, research and finally mock-ups. The whole package was then handed over to the company handling IT... thus naturally the above division was created. This model unfortunately continues also in organisations that create UX departments in-house or outsource IT services. Often the Business Analyst works with UX during the discovery phase, then after the mock-ups are done, UX is excluded from the delivery and scrum process. UX expert does not participate in the ceremonies and loses contact with the product he or she has authored. This is the opposite of what characterises digital product leaders. While designing a top product for a brand that is in the top 3 pharmaceutical companies in the world, I was able to experience the power of adapting UX to the scrum process. 2 years on from this project, I still believe that this approach maximises the potential of both UX and development budgets. This idea now guides all of us at Monogo when planning projects for our clients.
How do you integrate UX into the scrum process in an effective way?
The first way is to create two alternating sprints - UX and Delivery. The UX work comes before the development work by one sprint. The sprints last for a two-week period, in the middle of the UX sprint, the mock-ups are reviewed, comments are made by the technical team, the product owner or any member of the scrum team relevant to the product development context. At the end of the sprint, a mock-up of the finished functionality is created and handed over to implementation. You might think that not much changes in this approach. We also have a separate UX and dev team. This is a fact, but it is the beginning of an approach where there is some element of crossing between the two worlds. Dev + BA + Product Owner + any team member meeting in the middle of a UX sprint removes many of the factors that destabilise the delivery process. We have the space to align product knowledge, learn about the genesis and propose changes due to the technical nature or the long time needed for implementations.
However, the best form to show the highest maturity of an organisation is to add a UX specialist as a member of the scrum team. In this approach, UX, research and development tasks go into one backlog. BA's UX work on the backlog continuously and are essentially the main actors in the Backlog Refinement ceremony. They are the ones who provide completed user stories both in terms of AC and mock-ups of finished solutions. If there are changes/ambiguities on the backlog refinement, BA and UX are responsible for delivering the shuffle in such a form that it can be estimated and then 'taken' for a sprint. Product knowledge is shared and any need to change concepts is communicated on an ongoing basis.
A UX specialist is available at all times and ensures that the mock-up is in line with the final product. In scrum nomenclature, he or she is a developer, taking care of increment. It is much easier in this approach to manage time for research and to develop only validated hypotheses.
What do you gain by adding a UX specialist as a member of the scrum team?
Most importantly, the ability to test the solution with users at different stages of the project, from mock-up to clickable prototype to product on a test environment, is crucial. Any need for changes resulting from user interviews or change requests go through the solution developer. In essence, UX is the only person in the entire team who is able to anticipate the consequences of changes in the broad context of the product's user journey. Without such a person, the product is only verified in the go-live version based on quantitative research. This is a big business risk.
Budgets burned through, users not converting as they should... it is definitely cheaper to add a UX specialist as a member of the scrum team. The UX specialist in this model can draw and verify any hypothesis the team deems worth verifying. He or she will conduct in-depth interviews, analyse the data, prepare A/B tests and draw as many versions of the solution as it takes to be able to choose the best one, be it from the perspective of technology, development time and, finally, the user.
The UX expert will conduct meetings touching upon the creation of mock-ups of the functionality, explain why he or she has designed a particular functionality in such a way and whether the changes proposed by the team do not disrupt the process in some other place, which the team may not yet be aware of, as UX is designing the solution forward. It may know, for example, that this particular feature will later be developed in some direction, so awareness of everyone involved in the project as to the solution developer's concept is extremely important in this case.
And finally - UX can focus on the quality of the delivery of incremental mock-ups from the team's perspective and determine the quality of the so-called increment delivered.
A well-designed website is a website created with the customer in focus. You know the saying: "Once and done right"? Without a UX specialist and regular research, you are unable to determine the validity of the direction a project is heading. By adding UX permanently to your scrum process, you save your team time and money with the confidence that you are meeting your goals. There's a reason digital product leaders implement the design thinking it philosophy in their projects.
Want to implement UX into your organisation's scrum process?
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