7 minute read
Service Design goes Agile: Why service design is a perfect match with agile software development
Service design defines the why and the what of software, Scrum suggests how to implement and refine it. Both provide an iterative approach that is based on user feedback through early testing, and they both challenge the way designers work with developers.
GOING AGILE TO REDUCE RISKS
Advertisement
While navigating through the ‘fuzzy front-end’ of innovation, there’s a high risk of failure, since data from the past plus some assumptions about the future are all you have in terms of knowing how your customers might use your product or service. This is true for every kind of innovation and it’s particularly true for software. That’s why software development teams were among the first to apply agile planning methods. Today, Scrum is the most popular implementation of Agile. It’s a way of reducing the risks associated with complex projects through dynamic adaption to change. Instead of a traditional waterfall project management that specifies every software function upfront, then codes it over months or years for a big-bang release, Scrum shortens the release cycle to a maximum of 4 weeks to enable early feedback by users and business stakeholders. It is a data-driven approach to learning that enables you to make better decisions about the future.
DISCOVERING THE VALUE OF UX
In Scrum, there is the development team, the ‘Scrum master’ to facilitate the process, and the product owner: people like Paul. The software engineer is responsible for one of the mobile app products of an Internet start-up. In user story-mapping sessions (1) with his business stakeholders, Paul drills down their requirements into user stories. User stories describe a requirement from a user’s perspective. Paul is the guy who decides which user stories are to be put on a prioritised list of requirements that his product should meet, called the product backlog. Paul “is the sole person responsible for managing the product backlog.” (2) But Scrum doesn’t tell Paul how to identify the most valuable features or how to involve designers. In practice, most development teams have found that it helps a lot to let a designer enrich written user stories with some design concepts upfront. Since James Jesse Garrett suggested The Elements of User Experience (3) in 2000, UX has been widely adapted by organisations as a functional role. But how to manage collaboration between designers and developers in a Scrum setup?
SYNCHRONISING UX WITH AGILE DEVELOPMENT
Joanna is a designer. Originally, she started out designing visuals. Later, she was involved in concept work. When Joanna joined Paul’s team, she introduced personas, user journeys, wire framing and user research. She learned quickly that designers and developers bring along a different mindset. While she was working on the product as a whole, designing well thoughtthrough, pixel-perfect deliverables to ensure consistency, she was puzzled about how much developers were focused only on the feature they were coding and that they did not really appreciate the value of design.
Paul and Joanna adapted UX to the Scrum sprint cycle. Furthermore, design activities were divided into strategic and operational jobs. A UX team was established and staffed with experts for user research, interaction design, copywriting and visual design. On the operational level, Paul and the Scrum master helped Joanna’s UX team to apply Agile UX, introducing a staggered track mode of Scrum. Ongoing user research and ideation were synchronised with the rhythm of the Agile sprint planning. Designers worked two sprints in advance to specify user stories with design drafts that help developers to code much more effectively, support them while they code and review the quality.
On the strategic level, Joanna supported Paul to sharpen the vision of the product and the features that should be built. They introduced a product discovery process, starting to 'go out the building' to speak to users, explore problems and generate ideas to solve them. In addition, Paul started to run his user story mapping sessions with stakeholders based on Joanna’s user journeys.
FOLLOWING A LEAN UX APPROACH
Paul’s company is an advocate of Lean Start-up (4) , a way of building a start-up as part of an empiric, scientific process: stating a hypothesis about what might work with customers, developing it, measuring it and learning how to improve the product/market fit. ‘Lean’ is a term derived from lean production in manufacturing, and it essentially means avoiding any kind of waste. That’s why, just lately, Paul began applying Lean UX (5) with Joanna: in other words, incorporating lean principles with UX.
Lean UX shifts the focus from merely delivering documents to better experiences, for example, avoiding deliverables like detailed wireframes and design specifications upfront in favour of doing ‘just enough’, to learn quickly how to adapt. For Joanna, it meant shifting work from in-depth user research and glossy, well thought-out wireframes, screens and journeys to lean-design studio paper and whiteboard sketching with the whole team, as well as frequent guerrilla user testing, taking over a new role as a design thinking facilitator to co-create with the whole team.
SERVICE DESIGN TO SCOPE AND STRATEGISE
Designing the user experience in a lean and agile manner is fine. But since Paul is responsible for a mobile app, he faces additional challenges. How does his product interact with his company’s other products, like the web interface or the tablet app? Which features on which devices make sense, and how are they connected to one other and to the backend? And how does all this work go hand in hand with marketing, sales, and customer service? That’s where Joanna brought service design into play.
Although service design has been around for more than a decade now, it found broader acceptance in software development only in recent years. Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, the mobile Internet has been a main driver of this trend. Digital services via smartphones have become more ubiquitous in our daily lives than ever before. As a result, mobile devices are giving rise to service offerings that have not been attractive as a business before or that have even been unthinkable. This ubiquity has increased the complexity of software-based services enormously. If you think about software as a digitalised sequence of a broader service experience with both physical and digital touchpoints, the service design mindset helps to understand the interactions between users and software much better, since it goes beyond the limits of the screen’s pixel frame and describes the bigger picture of user needs, feelings and situational context in time and space.
Paul and Joanna applied service design by creating customer journeys that embed every physical and digital touchpoint. As a result, Paul and his team became very aware of how his mobile product contributes to the service experience as a whole. Joanna’s customer journey evolved into a ‘living’ service blueprint canvas in their office, visualising pain points in how the different digital products and business departments support the service experience. This helped Paul to keep the bigger context in mind while moving forward with his team.
For Paul, service design shifted UX to a new level, not only looking at screens, but at what is around and behind the device while it is being used, and what happens before, during and after it is used. His team added some new functionality to the product that emerged from a better understanding of the user’s context, and it eliminated some feature creep, because they understood why it was not used.
SERVICE DESIGN GOES LEAN AND AGILE
Joanna and Paul introduced service design as a framework for product discovery and product-to-service alignment, adding more quality and effectiveness to the product teams. Each product team is staffed with UX designers now. Executed in a lean way, designers have become facilitators of co-creation and service design has become the third force in Paul’s company, along with business and product development. And now Joanna is involved in strategic discussions with the board. Just lately, they have been discussing renaming the UX function to service design. But that might take a little while yet … •
References
(1) Jeff Patton (2003). http://www.agileproductdesign.com/presentations/ user_story_mapping/
(2) Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. https://www.scrum.org/Scrum-Guide
(3) Garrett, Jesse James (2002, New Riders Publishing). The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web
(4) Eric Ries (2011, Crown Business). The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
(5) Jeff Gothelf (2013, O’Reilly). Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience
Jens Otto Lange is a design facilitator at GuentherLange. He helps teams to co-create innovation for the digital age, working on behalf of such clients as Airbus, Axel Springer and Otto. Jens initiated Service Design Hamburg and contributes to the MoDAL Network exploring the intersection of lean, agile and service design.
