You most probably have heard the term Lean UX comes up in a methodology conversation. If you think of how many methodologies there are, you might be confused about which to apply in your organization, although it really depends on the company’s needs. Numerous significant information technology companies have already included aspects of other things into the product design and development methods they employ, but in this meet-up, we have talked about the merging of Lean UX and Scrum. No doubt that either Lean UX or Scrum works well alone, but many believe that the combination of these two is the key to making and executing a project to be successful.
It's not just UX users who have a hard time adapting to Agile. When it comes to understanding how UX matches up with Agile or deciding when to conduct research and design each sprint, you may be stumped. It's possible that you're struggling to conduct any user research at all, or that you're too busy to do viable UX tasks. So, we’re extremely grateful that Josh and Erik have shared their best practices to make Lean UX + Scrum work effectively.
Three Big Learning Points
The course started when Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf believed that Designers and Agile can efficiently work together. What has been pondering on everyone’s mind is how to make integrating Lean UX into the Scrum process work? The three major moving blocks were discussed at the meet-up to streamline the process.
Starting with; Reframe work as a problem to investigate. Following this design, everything you do is an assumption that needs to be validated. This means you don't spend as much time constructing product requirements and more time involving your development teams in the exploration and design process. To give us the room for such changes, Lean UX canvas is the perfect tool to help with this structure. Lean UX canvas is a place to gather our assumptions and a place to organize or in other terms, our North Star for the project in a lightweight way that's open for iteration.
The canvas is the single-page view of these questions.
What's the business problem?
What does success look like for the business?
Who's the user?
Who's the customer?
What do, what do they need right?
What's the solution that we intend?
What are the risks?
UX specialists on the team. A designer should be assigned to only one team so they can become fully immersed in that environment. A single designer should not be expected to serve the needs of many scrum groups, as this would require them to work across multiple sets of people. Even if they decide to modify the project every three or six months, this will ensure that the team is able to work together.
UX work in the product backlog. The process of organizing your work is simultaneous, the easiest to explain but the most difficult to master. Many teams have various backlogs for different sorts of work but having one structure for each culture is one of the best practices in attempting to properly implement this concept. The issue with gathering PBIs, user stories, or epics in one backlog while establishing a separate list of work for designers is that it splits the members into two teams. The goal is to combine the backlog's structure into one.
Summary
This blog post provides a brief discussion of how to efficiently apply the Lean UX + Scrum methodology into practice. Finding the method or plan that is most effective for your company is essential because there is no universally applicable solution to this problem. It is crucial for organizations to embrace changes to produce products of higher quality and achieve a high level of customer satisfaction.
Key topics:
What problem are we trying to solve?
What do Scrum, and UX Practitioners say?
Scrum and UX Share a Common Foundation
Three Big Moving Blocks
Watch the full meeting here