Thanks to Carol Smith from our User Experience group for pointing this out on Yammer. In the portal and social world, we have struggled to pull User Experience activities into a sprint based approach like Scrum. We’ve started down the path on a couple project but Jon Innes has an article at boxes and arrows on Integrating UX Into the Backlog. He goes to a deeper level and I think my next project will have to include something like this.
Best Quote:
The economics are different in selling consumer products than when developing software for enterprises—UX matters more for consumer products. Jeff Bezos cares if users know how to click the button that puts money in his pocket more than Larry Ellison cares about any button in Oracle software. Larry makes money even if people can’t use his software. Oracle sells support contracts and professional services to fix things customers don’t like. Amazon and other online businesses can’t operate like that. They have to get the UX right, or they go out of business fast. User experience factors rarely get the same level of consideration when the end-user is not the same person as the paying customer
Jon’s General Approach
The key problem is how you take user experience activities like job shadowing, interface testing, etc. and putting them into an Agile approach. Jon correctly notes that a lot of UX activities involves iterations so at least at a high level, you should be able to stick them in Sprints. The question which Jon answers is how. He starts with the key dependencies that you would want to understand as you create your backlog:
- Order of dependency or workflow (self-service password reset depends on user registration)
- Criticality (which of these stories must be done so customers pay us next month)
- How much work will they take to complete (show me all the epics)
- What related stories do I have (find requirements with related UI patterns)
- By role or persona (show me all the stories that impact persona X)
- What stories have a high impact on the UX, so we can focus on those
He then defines a pretty good little matrix and give you the following: (Note: I’m leaving out a lot of information because it’s his post and you should click over to it to get the complete gist of the thing.
This is what it might look like after you have defined user stories and put them in the backlog
