by Jeff Gothelf
The team captures their learning on a single-page canvas, as shown in Figure 9-6.
Figure 9-6. The Service Definition Workshop canvas from ustwo
Following the Workshop, MVPs and Collaboration
After the initial two-day collaboration, ustwo spent an additional two weeks prototyping their early ideas and testing them with potential users. During this time the client team participates in daily stand-ups as much as they can. When the prototyping phase is over, both the client and ustwo have a clearer sense of what the project will entail, what the scope of that effort might be, and, perhaps most important, what it’s going to be like to work together.
Figure 9-7. ustwo team members and their client participating in a Service Definition Workshop
ustwo have found this fixed-price engagement (in many ways a variation of the Design Sprint technique) to be a far more effective way to share how they work with new clients than the traditional Keynote pitch deck. Because the investment in this workshop is small for all participants it’s a relatively easy service to sell, and the benefits—tighter scope, shared understanding, and team compatibility—far outweigh the costs. Amazingly, ustwo told us that more than 50 percent of these workshops end up in long-term engagements, a much better close rate than they see with their traditional pitches.
Lean UX in an Agency: Changing the Way We Sell Work
Lean UX grew up in the context of digital product development and the process changes required to thrive in the digital age. Companies that grew successful in predigital times built processes that made sense then but might have outlived their usefulness. Changing processes to become more digital can be difficult. This is especially true for advertising agencies that grew up around the production processes of the print and broadcast world. In this case study, we’ll look at how one successful marketing agency, Hello Group, is adapting to a digital world.
Hello Group, a growing digital agency with its roots in advertising, has been transitioning into broader design and strategy work for the past few years. As part of that, the agency had to rethink the way they partner with clients and third-party engineering vendors to deliver work. Lean UX has played a pivotal role in shifting the way they work. The company has drawn inspiration from Lean UX to create two important new tools to help them shape that conversation with their clients, vendors, and within the agency, with their own management team, as well.
Alignment, Coordination, and Flexibility
One big problem Hello Group faced was how to articulate the scope of their project work to the client and their engineering vendors in a way that created alignment and understanding but also provided enough flexibility to allow them to explore different features and alternative design implementations. Using the Lean UX hypothesis as a model, the agency created a tool called the Experience Story.
Experience Stories are mini-scenario statements that ensure designers stay focused on solving the problem at hand without becoming lost in the minutiae of feature details. It helps the design team stay focused on the vision, something that can so often become lost in the day-to-day micromanagement of tasks and progress. Experience Stories are based on customer research and observation insights. They describe the ideal experience a customer should go through when engaging with a service. They’re made up of three parts:
The current situation with which the customer is faced
The friction involved in that situation that the team is trying to address
The ideal experience the team wants to create
Here’s an example:
Two days on the cruise ship is a time filled with experiences. Guests come on board with the expectation of making the best of this time.
But we demand a lot from our guests; remember to print your boarding pass; remember which card was for breakfast and which was for dinner; remember whether you’ve paid for the dinner, etc.
A good experience would be when all of these details disappear and guests flow through the cruise ship from check in to check out.
These Experience Stories are shared both internally and with Hello’s clients and partners. This helps everyone orient around why the project is important and it serves as a consistent yardstick for all of the parties on a project.
Working with Third-Party Engineers
A second and perhaps even more daunting challenge Hello Group faced was their reliance on third-party engineering vendors to build the designs Hello Group created. If Hello wanted to work in a Lean UX way, how could they ensure that their partners—who are hired and incentivized differently—would conform to this way of working? They decided to use something they call the Project Working Agreement.
Inspired by David Bland’s Team Working Agreement, the Project Working Agreement lays out, in very clear terms, exactly how the different agencies will work together.1 The agreement covers things like the following:
What flavor of Agile the agencies will use
How long sprints are
Where the code will be kept
When the teams will meet
What tools they’ll use to meet and communicate
And much more.
It might seem like a lengthy, tedious exercise with which to kick off a project, but it’s proven to save Hello hours of negotiation later in the project. Figure 9-8 shows what it looks like.
Figure 9-8. The template that Hello Group uses to capture the Project Working Agreement
The Project Working Agreement is a tool for improving collaboration, something that is of paramount importance in Lean UX. And, like most things at the start of a project, the agreement is based on a series of assumptions. As a result, Hello Group treats the agreement as a living document. As the project progresses, the efficacy of the tactics listed in the agreement will vary. Teams can decide to update the agreement as needed in order to make the working process more productive.
A Last Word
Sometimes, it can feel impossible to change the entrenched habits of an organization. So, we were delighted to receive this email from our colleague Emily Holmes. As we read it, we knew we had to share it with you.
In the email, Emily, who is Director of UX at Hobsons, an educational-technology company in the Washington, DC, area, details the changes she’s made in her organization. Here are some excerpts that describe the journey her firm has taken:
I think a lot of enterprise companies struggle to figure out the best way to implement these techniques. We initially got a great deal of resistance that we couldn’t do Lean UX because we’re “not a startup,” but of course that’s really not true.
We brought in a coach to help reinforce with the team our goal of moving our development process toward a Lean UX methodology (it can help to have an outside voice to reinforce what’s being said internally), and since then we’ve made good progress. In less than a year, our team structure has moved from this:
Figure 9-9. Hobson’s original team structure
To this:
Figure 9-10. Hobson’s new lean team structure
I have introduced the following process/system for helping our teams internalize what needs to happen as we move through the discovery phase of a project, so we don’t skip any steps and so everyone can begin understanding why this thought process needs to happen.
Figure 9-11. Emily Holmes’s Lean UX “game” diagram
It requires ongoing coaching on my part and we haven’t completely mastered it yet, but it is really helping to get the full team in sync and speaking the same language. That’s no small feat, since our team includes people who are accustomed to business analysis, technical specs and waterfall development. It’s a little bit fun, so people don’t feel too resentful about having to change old habits. And, it definitely helps us fight the “monsters” that have traditionally been problematic for our organization.
I believe a lot of the things that are working for us could be applied to other enterprise organizations quite successfully.
We believe that, t
oo, and hope the stories we’ve presented in this chapter will help to inspire you on your Lean UX journey.
1 You can find a copy of this at http://www.leanuxbook.com/links.
Index
A
A/B testing, Coded and Live-Data Prototypes, A/B testing
AARRR (Startup Metrics for Pirates), Running the exercise: business outcomes
“Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-centered Design”, Staggered Sprints and Their Modern Offshoots
aesthetics, SHIFT: Speed first, aesthetics second
affinity mapping exercise, Priming the pump with affinity mapping
agencieschanging the way they sell work, lean UX case study, Lean UX in an Agency: Changing the Way We Sell Work-Working with Third-Party Engineers
deliverables and, SHIFT: Agencies are in the deliverables business
development partners and, A quick note about development partners
Agile software development, Design Is Always Evolving, The Foundations of Lean UXintegrating Lean UX with, Integrating Lean UX and Agile-Wrapping Upcase study, Knowsy, Case Study: Knowsy (by Lane Goldstone)-Beyond the Scrum Team
communicating with stakeholders, Beyond the Scrum Team
definition of Agile terms, Some Definitions
dual-track Agile, Dual-Track Agile
in the enterprise, Lean UX and Agile in the Enterprise
participation in processes, Participation
staggered sprints and modern offshoots, Staggered Sprints and Their Modern Offshoots
using Scrum to build lean UX practice, Exploiting the Rhythms of Scrum to Build a Lean UX Practice-Participation
tools for improving collaboration, Making Collaboration Work
user stories versus hypotheses, Running the exercise: assembling your feature hypotheses
Agile-fall, SHIFT: From BDUF to Agile-fall: same thing, new day
analysis versus making, Principle: making over analysis
analytics, site usage, Site usage analytics
Apple, Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), Design Systems: What’s in a Name?
asset libraries, Design Systems: What’s in a Name?
assumptions, Driving Vision with Outcomes-Method: Declaring Assumptionsdeclaring, Whopreparation for, Preparation
problem statement, Problem Statement
who to involve, Who
running business assumptions exercise, Running the Exercise: Business Assumptions Exercise
turning into hypothesis statement, Hypotheses
types of, important to lean UX, Assumptions: The Big Four
Axure, Clickable mockups
B
backlogs, Some Definitionsin dual-track Agile, Dual-Track Agile
Balsamiq, Example: Using a Prototype MVP
batches, working in, Principle: work in small batches to mitigate risk
BDUF (big design up front), shifting away from, SHIFT: From BDUF to Agile-fall: same thing, new day
behavior, measuring (with MVPs), Creating an MVP to Understand Value
behavioral infomation (personas), Persona Format
Bezos, Jeff, SHIFT: Small teams
big design up fron (BDUF), shifting from, SHIFT: From BDUF to Agile-fall: same thing, new day
Blank, Steve, Principle: GOOB: the new user-centricity
Bootstrap framework, Case Study: GE Design System
brand guidelines, Design Systems: What’s in a Name?
Brown, Tim, The Foundations of Lean UX
build-measure-learn feedback loop, The Foundations of Lean UX
business assumptions exercise, Running the Exercise: Business Assumptions Exercise
business outcomes, Assumptions: The Big Four, Running the exercise: business outcomes(see also outcomes)
brainstorming possible outcomes, Running the exercise: business outcomes
C
Cagan, Marty, Dual-Track Agiledual-track Agile process diagram, Dual-Track Agile
CarMax, lean UX at (case study), Online to Offline: Lean UX at CarMax-Setting Client Expectations at a Digital Product Studio: Lean UX at ustwointegrating in-store sales staff, Integrating In-Store Sales Staff
lean UX, customer experience, and service design, Lean UX + Customer Experience + Service Design
next iteration of finance application, The Next Iteration
proto-personas, Proto Personas
seeking an outcome, Seeking an Outcome
testing a hypothesis, Testing a Hypothesis
testing another hypothesis, Testing Another Hypothesis
case studies, Case Studies-A Last Wordlean UX in an agency, changing the way they sell work, Lean UX in an Agency: Changing the Way We Sell Work-Working with Third-Party Engineers
online to offline, lean UX at CarMax, Online to Offline: Lean UX at CarMax-Setting Client Expectations at a Digital Product Studio: Lean UX at ustwo
regulations and financial services, lean UX at PayPal, Regulations and Financial Services: Lean UX at PayPal-The Results
setting client expectations at digital product studio, lean UX at ustwo, Setting Client Expectations at a Digital Product Studio: Lean UX at ustwo-Following the Workshop, MVPs and Collaboration
team organization at Hobson, A Last Word-A Last Word
clickable mockups, Clickable mockups
client expectations, setting at digital product studio, ustwo case study, Setting Client Expectations at a Digital Product Studio: Lean UX at ustwo-Following the Workshop, MVPs and Collaboration
code repositories, Design Systems: What’s in a Name?
coded and live-data prototypes, Coded and Live-Data Prototypescoded prototypes in usability testing, Coded prototypes
collaborationamong distributed teams, SHIFT: Distributed teams
breaking down physical barriers to, SHIFT: Workspace
in Lean UX, Design Is Always Evolving
in Sy and Miller's staggered sprints model, Staggered Sprints and Their Modern Offshoots
making it work, Making Collaboration Work
organizational roles and, SHIFT: Roles
collaborative design (see design)
collaborative discovery, Collaborative Discoveryexample of, A Collaborative Discovery Example
in the field, Collaborative Discovery in the Field
colocated teams, benefits of, Principle: small, dedicated, colocated
communication services, real-time, SHIFT: Distributed teams
competencies over roles, SHIFT: Roles
continuous discovery, Principle: continuous discovery
continuous integration, Design Is Always Evolving
conversation among team members, Collaborative Design: The Informal Approach
copy writing styles, What goes into a design system?
cover your ass (CYA) behavior, SHIFT: Roles
creativity, experimentation and, Principle: permission to fail
cross-functional collaborationimportance of, SHIFT: Cross-functional teams
organizational roles and, SHIFT: Roles
cross-functional teams, Principle: cross-functional teamsorgnizational shift to, SHIFT: Cross-functional teams
culturechanging in implementing lean UX, Changing Cultureagency culture, SHIFT: Agencies are in the deliverables business
being realistic about your environment, SHIFT: Be realistic about your environment
falling in love with the problem, not the solution, SHIFT: Fall in love with the problem, not the solution
humility, SHIFT: Humility
no more heroes, SHIFT: No more heroes
workspaces, SHIFT: Workspace
lean UX principles guiding, Principles to Guide Culturemoving from doubt to certainty, Principle: moving from doubt to certainty
no rock stars, gurus, or ninjas, Principle: no rock stars, gurus, or ninjas
outcomes, not output, Principle: outcomes, not output
permission to fail, Principle: permission to fail
removing waste, Principle: removing waste
shar
ed understanding, Principle: shared understanding
customer feedbackgetting from a prototype MVP, Example: Using a Prototype MVP
in continuous discovery, Principle: continuous discovery
in lean startup, The Foundations of Lean UX
on-site feedback surveys, On-Site Feedback Surveys
teams getting, Principle: self-sufficient and empowered
customer journey maps, Shift: UX debt, Lean UX + Customer Experience + Service Design
customer service, harnessing their knowledge, Customer Service
customersAARRR in Startup Metrics for Pirates, Running the exercise: business outcomes
determinations about, using proto-personas, The Persona Creation Process
D
Dailey, Robert, SHIFT: Cross-functional teams
data-informed versus data-driven design, Hypotheses
dedicated teams, benefits of, Principle: small, dedicated, colocated
deliverables, The Foundations of Lean UXagency culture and, SHIFT: Agencies are in the deliverables business