24 Hours of UX - Agile + UX: Good, Bad, Ugly

Editor's Notes

1. "User Experience Design plus Agile: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", presented by Joshua Randall during 24 Hours of UX on June 8, 2022.
2. I want to thank “24 Hours of UX’ for inviting me to present. I am the president of the Cleveland, Ohio, chapter of the UXPA, the User Experience Professionals Association. We are a local chapter of the broader UXPA International which you can reach at uxpa.org – UXPA is the organization that supports people who research, design, and evaluate the user experience of products and services. UXPA International has chapters all over the world and many of them offer online or virtual meetings, so please check them out. In addition you can still get tickets to the UXPA International conference coming up on June 21-23 in San Diego, CA.
3. Before we get any further let me introduce myself. My name is Joshua Randall and I’m a product designer at RevLocal, which provides digital marketing services for local businesses – we do local search optimization, review marketing, social media, and more. If you’re in the United States and you represent a bricks-and-mortar business please visit us at revlocal.com – shameless plug completed. Talking through my career progression -- I worked as an information technology business analyst for 20 years, mostly at big Cleveland companies: American Greetings, Progressive Insurance, Medical Mutual, and Sherwin-Williams among others. 15 ago I joined an Agile project at Progressive Insurance, and I’ve been an Agile enthusiast ever since. My first love is Extreme Programming (XP), but I am also a Certified ScrumMaster. I started working as a User Experience Designer about eight years ago. And I currently have the title ‘Senior Product Designer’ at RevLocal.
4. Looking at my educational background, I have a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Yale University, which goes to show that you never know where your career will take you. I have a master’s degree in User Experience Design from Kent State University, and I’m now also an adjunct instructor in that program – so the circle of life continues. [next slide]
5. [go through agenda] This is primarily an informational presentation, not a how-to. I’ll go over some patterns I’ve observed and give you my thoughts on pros and cons, but the nitty gritty how-to is another presentation. Agile and UX Design are both big topics – giant domains of knowledge with multiple points of view. I can only touch on them in the time we have together.
6. Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo or as we say it in English, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, is an absolutely fantastic movie. If you ever get the chance to see it on the big screen, do so, because Sergio Leone’s use of the vast widescreen canvas in spectacular. Also it has an instantly recognizable score by Ennio Morricone that is as much a character in the movie as Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, or Lee Van Cleef. But this isn’t the film studies talk so you probably want to hear about the good, the bad, and the ugly of agile and user experience design. Throughout the presentation I’ll label certain discussion points as Good, Bad, or Ugly. These are my educated opinions and while you can certainly disagree, think about *why* we might disagree. My goal here is to inspire you to think about things more deeply than surface level disagreements.
7. This is the section heading slide for the “Introduction”. There’s no actual content on it.
8. Because UXPA is an international organization and because 24 Hours of UX is also international, I’m curious: where’s everyone from? Use the polling feature in Hopin. We’ll wait a few seconds for people to respond… [talk briefly about the results]
9. This is the section heading slide for the “Definitions” section. There’s no actual content on it.
10. This is the section heading slide for the “What is Agile?” section. There’s no actual content on it.
11. https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/books/aoad2/what_is_agile
12. https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/books/aoad2/what_is_agile
13. This is the section heading slide for the “What is UX Design” section. There’s no actual content on it.
14. The first term we need to define is the D in UXD – design. Here you see the definitions I pulled from the old dictionary I have in my office; I chose that on purpose because its publication date of 1983 predates the modern internet. The key aspect of the word design whether as verb or noun is that design requires intention. Design is not accidental. You can make haphazard or ignorant decisions when designing something, but you are still making decisions.
15. Norman, Don and Nielsen, Jakob. "The Definition of User Experience". Nielsen Norman Group. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience
16. http://spin.dexterityux.com/ My colleague Keith Instone, who’s one of the organizers of “24 Hours of UX” has a presentation he calls “Spins on UX” in which he goes over a variety of definitions of the term. And he points out the the classic Don Norman definition leaves a lot to be desired, because it’s simultaneously too vague and too old fashioned – leaving out services and brands (as opposed to products) as well as organizations.
17. Another way to answer the question ‘What is UX?’ is to consider the vast landscape that term encompasses. This slide from Darren Hood gives you a sense for how big this domain of knowledge can be. I don’t expect you to be able to read all the small words, but look at the big ones. We can conceptualize UX in 4 main groups. user research, which is the underpinning of all design work information architecture, which is how we organize and label information interaction design & interface design, which encompasses activities like wireframing and visual design; and interaction design: what's on the screen and how people use it - focuses on how people interact with the product (hence the name) - goals, ergonomics, etc. interface design: what those elements look like - proximity, color, negative space, typography, etc. heuristics & usability, which is how we evaluate our designs against best practices or against real-world uses of them
18. Now that we’ve covered some definitions, I’m curious about you, again Let’s do another quick survey in Hopin – do you consider yourself a UX-er, a software developer-slash-engineer, or something else? [pause, briefly discuss results]
19. [start at ”Agile”]
20. Sources Art of Agile Development Design Thinking IDF article https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process
21. Sources Art of Agile Development Design Thinking IDF article https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process
22. This is the section heading slide for the "Why Can't We Get Along?" section. There’s no actual content on it.
23. My sarcastic joke here is what I originally wrote. But as thought more about what Alan Cooper wrote, I want to back off from the heavy sarcasm and acknowledge that he touches a nerve when he writes that part of the appeal of the iterative process (that is, Agile) is that is relieves us from the “rigorous planning, thinking, and product due diligence”. That is, Cooper is saying that part of the appeal of Agile is that it claims to remove the need for hard work! Rigorous planning and thinking is hard and time consuming. And the modern day obsession with speed leaves neither time nor energy for thinking and planning.
24. “Iteration never creates great products.” – wow. Harsh words. And I think demonstrably wrong. Iteration can lead to great products, when done properly. He then later says “getting to the right product is always a matter of iterating” – so at least make up your mind, Alan Cooper. He writes that interaction design can reduce the number of iterations you need to do – and again, as I said on the last slide, if I step back from my deliberate sarcasm, I can acknowledge that doing the hard work of interaction design *can* reduce the *number* of iterations we need. After all, here in 2022, we are not making up web and app interactions from whole cloth the way we were in the 1990s. There are well established patterns and principles to draw upon. But where Cooper goes wrong is when he writes of the “enormous cost in each new version of a product”. That might be true for physical products but it is not true for digital products. And that atavistic fear of iterating your products set UX at odds with Agile from the early days.
25. Image source: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Designing+for+the+Digital+Age%3A+How+to+Create+Human+Centered+Products+and+Services-p-9780470229101
26. Here we have Kim Goodwin mocking Agile and what’s more, mocking the stakeholders within an Agile product: [click] those annoying stakeholders who can’t agree on anything until they have something to look at. [click] Maybe the solution is just start building the thing, and iterate your way to requirements. But when we laugh at this joke it is with bitter laughter because Goodwin is somewhat correct. Many stakeholders do reject any possibility of sitting down to hash out requirements; instead, they push for software to be built so they have something to look at and to play with. In Goodwin’s last sentence [click] she offers the solution which is to use prototypes or sketches. Regardless of how right or wrong we think Goodwin is with these quotes, the point remains that she’s mocking Agile, mocking the stakeholders, and this set a tone for UX designers.
27. When Goodwin isn’t mocking Agile, she’s damning it with faint praise [click] writing that Agile might work but only if you have skilled engineers working on simple products. [click] Her solution, echoing what she wrote previously, is for the designers to iterate their sketches *before* coding begins. Two super important concepts getting established here: first that the designers work separately from developers; [click] and second that designers do their work before the developers do theirs. Again, from the early days, UX is setting itself apart from Agile.
28. [click] What can make your Agile project successful is to have an established visual system and a small engineering team working closely with you (the designer). Yes! Absolutely right! That small, dedicated team is supposed to be a prerequisite for Agile to work properly. Problem is, we don’t often get it. Goodwin also writes that [click] ~ . This is undeniably true, part of the variance of human talent and knowledge. She continues, [click] ~ -- haha! Zing! We laugh. But the joke doesn’t go far enough. *All* engineers are likely to take shortcuts, maybe all *people*. That’s human nature. The antidote goes back to strong requirements and that established visual system Goodwin mentioned. But how often do we have either of those things, let alone both? Alan Cooper and Kim Goodwin set Agile and UX at odds with mockery mixed with some biting, true commentary about their difficulties. Those difficulties have been true for 30 years and partly explain why we can’t get along.
29. Image source: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Designing+for+the+Digital+Age%3A+How+to+Create+Human+Centered+Products+and+Services-p-9780470229101
30. It was supposed to be about people. Value. Quality.
31. Alan Cooper and Kim Goodwin set UX at odds with Agile from the early days. Steve Krug's over optimism promised user research within the iteration on a cadence that UX can't maintain. And Jeff Sutherland insisted that the only thing that matters about Scrum is speed. These are the foundational reasons Agile and UX can't get along.
32. image source: https://usabilitygeek.com/marrying-user-centered-design-agile-software-development-process-tips-success/ article source: http://uxpajournal.org/adapting-usability-investigations-for-agile-user-centered-design/
33. Image source: https://www.oreilly.com/learning/integrating-lean-ux-and-agile Article source: https://svpg.com/dual-track-agile/ (for the date) See also Jeff Patton's explanation, https://www.jpattonassociates.com/dual-track-development/
34. Image source: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/lean-ux-2nd/9781491953594/ch04.html Image source: http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/pages/gallery.php
35. Image source https://www.oreilly.com/learning/integrating-lean-ux-and-agile
36. Source: https://www.gv.com/sprint/ “A shortcut to learning”…[click] this hearkens back to what Alan Cooper wrote in 2004. [click] Nobody wants to learn the hard, slow way; we want to do it the easy, fast way.
37. https://library.gv.com/the-gv-research-sprint-interview-participants-and-summarize-findings-day-4-3d34792baa3f Later in the book, Google tells you what to do on each day of the design sprint. They end with you testing a prototype with real live humans. Yes! [click] Good! You should absolutely do that, at any level of prototype fidelity. But then it becomes hand-wave-y: [click] just “figure out what you’re going to do next”. [click] Maybe you “update the prototype”… does that translate into changes to your product? [click] Or maybe you “decide to focus on a new set of questions and assumptions”… does that mean you’re done with the previous product? After one week? [next slide]
38. Which leads to another realization: the Google Design Sprint isn’t Agile – it’s fast waterfall. [click, click, click…] It tells you what to do on each day of the week, and the later activities can’t start until the previous activities are completed. This is just an old-school project manager Gantt chart in new clothing. [next slide]
39. When I was searching for a diagram to represent how this version of badly done Agile is merely fast waterfall, I came across this absolutely amazing specimen. Here we have the waterfall process on the left, and then on the right we have… exactly the same process but shown in a loop. [click] That doesn’t make it Agile! The point of Agile was to do a little bit of everything with each increment of value, in whatever order made sense. Not to do the same steps, in the same order, but faster and somehow in a circular motion.
40. Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/agile-not-easy-ux/ Here in 2017, Page Laubheimer of Nielsen Norman Group puts his finger on a problem. As he writes, ~~ . He’s absolutely correct. Scrum and Agile user stories are often focused at too granular of a level, on what we would now call a micro interaction, optimizing that tiny piece of functionality but ignoring the user’s overall tasks and goals. It doesn’t do us much good to have a beautifully designed and coded product configuration wizard if the overall experience of shopping on the site is terrible. Let’s call this the ugly truth of modern development. We may be getting better at those micro interactions, but we’re still ignoring the overall experience.
41. Source: https://uxpamagazine.org/agile-ux/ In 2018 there’s an article in the magazine of the UXPA titled “Agile UX: It’s Not As Bad As You Think.” This reminds me of those jokes people tell in Cleveland, like, “Cleveland: At least we’re not Detroit.” [click] Any time you use the word ‘grudgingly’ you have a steep uphill climb. There is some underlying reason for people’s disgruntlement. We also see the phrase ‘when done right’ which puts me in mind of those late-night college discussions about how Communism would be great ‘when done right’, but those darned real people keep doing it wrong. So if Agile-ized UX only works ‘when done right’ then there’s a serious underlying problem with both Agile and UX. If Agile and UX are too hard for those darned real people to do right, then rather than try to change human behavior (which is extremely difficult), maybe we need to change our approach. I have to pause here to state that one of the authors of this article, Nicole Derr, is a friend of mine; and I have served on a board with Becky Bristol. So I only mock them with love.
42. Source: https://www.scrum.org/courses/professional-scrum-user-experience-training In 2019, Scrum.org gets in the game with a class on how to bridge Scrum and UX. For clarity, Scrum.org is the *other* Scrum organization, the one created by Ken Schwaber, the other co-creator of Scrum (with Jeff Sutherland). That’s right – just as in many movies about businesses, the real life co-creators of Scrum split up and made rival organizations. In any case: one of the rules of Scrum is ”Thou shalt not have work that extend beyond the Sprint.” [click] So it’s astounding that this course actually acknowledges that design work might have to do just that, extends beyond the Sprint. I say this get a “good” label. Because admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery.
43. Source http://uxpamagazine.org/aux3-making-ux-research-track-with-agile/ In 2019 in the Journal of Usability Studies, which is also a publication of the UXPA, these authors present what they call “AUX3 (Agile UX with 3 Tracks)”. As they write, “we propose organizing UX work into three tracks to expose the three different types of work: Learning (research methods such as ethnography), Problem Solving (wireframes, interaction design, and so on), and Execution (visual design, design language development, and so on).” To be clear that’s 3 tracks worth of UX work. None of this is development work, so it’s unlike dual-track Agile in that regard. Let’s look closer at what the UX team is promising to do in each iteration…. [click through]
44. Source: https://www.forrester.com/report/Agile+And+Design+Teams+Better+Together/-/E-RES152595# Forrester Research makes an important point in this January 2021 research report: that we have two different disciplines with different cultures. If Agile and UX were different tribes of people, we would *expect* them to clash precisely *because* of their lack of shared artifacts and ceremonies. In human society, tribes of people have come together, adopted each other’s customs, and created a new blended culture. But that takes a long time, and both Agile and UX are relatively immature disciplines on a human scale. Think of it this way: many of us here are old enough that in our lifespans, we were working before either Agile or UX was invented. It could be multiple more generations before our tribes blend successfully.
45. Source: https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2020/01/is-focusing-on-agile-or-lean-damaging-the-practice-of-ux-part-1.php Finally, and this it the only one of my sources that is not in chronological order simply because it is the definitive summation – UX Matters in 2020 asked a panel of experts the question “Is focusing on Agile or Lean damaging the practice of UX?” The answer was a resounding “YES”. [click] The panelists mention “shortcuts” – exactly what Alan Cooper warned us about. They lament the “focus on speed” – exactly what Jeff Sutherland brought about with his Scrum book subtitle. And they note how it’s “difficult for product teams to keep the big picture on mind” – exactly as Page Laubheimer of the Nielsen Norman Group stated. [click] One of the panelists states that he doesn’t see much actual Lean or Agile *at all*, just a chase for productivity gains at the expense of all else. If you’d like to be even more depressed, seek out this article and read both parts of it.
46. To take our minds off that depressing article, let’s do another poll. [launch it] The reason I ask this question is that many of the methods I’ve discussed, these attempt to reconcile Agile with UX, come out of the United States West Coast venture capital culture. Sometimes explicitly as in the case of Marty Cagan’s Silicon Valley Product Group, and sometimes implicitly as in the case of Lean UX. But the vast majority of us do *not* work for venture-backed startups. And the vast majority of all startups fail. So why are we emulating them? What is it about otherwise rational businesspeople in stable, non-venture-backed business, that makes them want to be something they are not? Food for fought.
47. As I wrap up this section – many of the recommendations in these articles show a back-and-forth handoff of work from the Agile team to the UX Designer, or some kind of intertwined sprints, separate for each discipline. What else makes those V shapes and is used in a back-and-forth motion? A saw. And like using a sawblade to cut through wood, keeping your Agile and UX design teams separate is going to end up cutting your organization apart. Cutting you off from truly delivering a great user experience, rather than merely optimizing for speed and micro interactions.
48. This is the section heading slide for the “Summary and Conclusion”. There’s no actual content on it.