This document is a UX survival guide by Nicole Capuana that provides lessons for UX professionals working in agile environments. It recommends that UX professionals be fully integrated members of product teams from the beginning. It also advises establishing a product strategy and vision through exploration before development begins. Additionally, it stresses the importance of making UX work visible, pairing with other team members, embracing an interdisciplinary team approach, testing ideas early and often, and avoiding common traps like failing to incorporate user research.
This document is a UX survival guide by Nicole Capuana that provides lessons for UX professionals working in agile environments. It recommends that UX professionals be fully integrated members of product teams from the beginning. It also advises establishing a product strategy and vision through exploration before development begins. Additionally, it stresses the importance of making UX work visible, pairing with other team members, embracing an interdisciplinary team approach, testing ideas early and often, and avoiding common traps like failing to incorporate user research.
This document is a UX survival guide by Nicole Capuana that provides lessons for UX professionals working in agile environments. It recommends that UX professionals be fully integrated members of product teams from the beginning. It also advises establishing a product strategy and vision through exploration before development begins. Additionally, it stresses the importance of making UX work visible, pairing with other team members, embracing an interdisciplinary team approach, testing ideas early and often, and avoiding common traps like failing to incorporate user research.
This document is a UX survival guide by Nicole Capuana that provides lessons for UX professionals working in agile environments. It recommends that UX professionals be fully integrated members of product teams from the beginning. It also advises establishing a product strategy and vision through exploration before development begins. Additionally, it stresses the importance of making UX work visible, pairing with other team members, embracing an interdisciplinary team approach, testing ideas early and often, and avoiding common traps like failing to incorporate user research.
@ncapuana Once upon a time in a kingdom of robots....
@ncapuana Hello! ● Director of User Experience at LeanDog ● Founding member of HER Ideas in Motion, a non-profit teaching girls how to code, design games, & build robots ● Organizer of Cleveland Lean Startup Circle ● Over 15 years in UX covering the whole spectrum - HTML/CSS. interaction design, visual design, information architecture, user research, usability & content strategy
@ncapuana ● Agile maximizing value, Saint Possum maximizing feedback, and embracing change. ● Lean minimizing waste, validating or invalidating assumptions, learning and adapting to deliver value incrementally. ● UX everything your users experience
@ncapuana Lesson 1
UX is part of the team
● Team member ● More than wireframes or mockups ● From beginning to end ● Stories, chores, and refactoring just like development ● Dedicated ideal ● 2 projects max If you don’t have UX on the team, you need to get them
@ncapuana Lesson 2
strategy & vision before development
● Allows exploration, experimentation ● View of the whole ● Supports business case & telling story ● Defines scope ● UX led, design spikes ● Good, Better, Best mentality
@ncapuana Lesson 3
Make UX Work Visible
● Represent UX work in release plan & backlog ● Design spikes, chores, & cards ● Estimation is on par with Dev ● Put your work up on the wall ● Share your work with tools like InvisionApp and Zeplin
@ncapuana Lesson 4
Pair on Everything ● Cross-functional powers ● Shared understanding ● Cross-pollination ● You do better work, faster ● Promotes a whole team mindset
@ncapuana Lesson 5
Be a Balanced Team ● High ● Make a happy team ● Find better ways collaboration to work ● Skills not roles ● Assess desirability, feasibility & usability together
@ncapuana Lesson 6
Find Your Balance
● Let ego go ● Let it go ● Small, imperfect, but deliverable (varying ● May feel levels of fidelity) uncomfortable at first ● Expand your skills ● There’s always more (test, write stories) to do
@ncapuana Lesson 7
Test Early & Often
● Test the riskiest, the ● Get it in your user's’ hands ASAP most valuable ● Design incrementally in thin slices ● Build on the best practices so you don’t have to test everything ● Embrace Test-Driven Design ● Make data informed decisions ● 10x, 100x, 1000x
@ncapuana Lesson 8
There Will Be DeBt
● Issues will be found once ● Help team prioritize the you start implementing or most valuable or severe building first ● Connecting towards the whole can reveal spots that no longer work well
@ncapuana ● No UX Don’t Fall into TRaps ● Playing catch-up ● Working in ● Non designers silos or alone designing ● Not embracing change
● No time for users
● Mockup every ● Accepting status-quo screen in ● “I just know what Photoshop they want”
@ncapuana You Can Do It ● Don’t look back ● Make do with what you got and take a step to change
@ncapuana You asked - additional readings Books ● Don’t Make Me Think AND Rocket Surgery Made Easy, Steve Krug ● The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, Jesse James Garrett ● Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions Bella Martin, Bruce M. Hanington ● Agile Experience Design: A Digital Designer's Guide to Agile, Lean, and Continuous Lindsay Ratcliffe, Marc McNeill ● Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
A fantastic and comprehensive list - The Only UX Reading List
Design Studio Method
● Todd Zaki Warfel (video) ● Design Studio: A Method for Concepting, ● Critique & Iteration ● Speed Design Studio - ● Design Studio for context-aware products ● Introduction to Design Studio Methodology ● Design of Design Studio ● Design Studio and Agile UX Process and Pitfalls @ncapuana
