Creating "Big Picture" Designs without Big Design
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Add to calendarOne of the toughest problems facing agile UX designers is keeping the big picture in mind while designing incrementally. This talk builds on prior work at Alias (now Autodesk) that described successful agile adaptations of usability testing, contextual inquiry and iterative prototyping.
I’ll present a framework we used to create and implement multi-sprint designs for a complex product without violating the agile taboo against big design.
PowerPoint presentation, interspersed with questions from the audience, and questions for discussion. Since the questions may require more reflection and discussion than is available in a 90 minute session, I’ll also meet with interested attendees at an open session later in the week at the conference (time and location announced during the talk) to discuss people’s answers.
Introduction (5 minutes)
Problem: The 2-week treadmill (15 minutes)
The framework: Levels of design (10 minutes)
- Each piece of design work is part of the whole.
- Define designs at the product level, the release level, the capability level, and the sprint level
- Examples, discussion and questions
Design chunking (20 minutes)
- Once goals are established at different levels of design, it becomes possible to digest a big design into design chunks that are Agile-sized
- Examples, discussion and questions
Mini-releases (15 minutes)
- After a whole design is complete, it must be broken into mini-releases, so that it’s implemented in an order that prioritizes the delivery of capabilities.
- Examples, discussion and questions
Putting it together (15 minutes)
- How to work with the rest of the agile team to make the designs work
- Examples, discussion and questions
Questions and follow-up instructions (10 minutes)
- Time and place for the follow-up discussion.
- Learn a framework for creating multi-sprint designs.
- Learn how to think about design at different levels of detail (from product to sprint level).
- Learn about how to prototype, iterate, and validate in agile-sized design chunks.
- Learn how to define Done for design.
- Learn about how to define agile-sized mini-releases that incrementally build to a coherent whole.
- Learn how to put both the user and the story back into user stories.
- Learn how to work with the rest of the agile team to prevent implementation drift.
- See successful examples of the above, and learn some characteristics of our agile projects that help make them successful.
