The User Feedback Two-Step
As Agile practitioners, we recognize the need for a strong and accurate user voice on the Agile team. And yet, an Agile project leaves little time for elaborate up-front design and lengthy user research. In this session we’ll practice the User Feedback Two-Step, the dance that user representatives on a team have to play to interleave their work with the developers and with end-users. Nimble players can be ready with designed and tested user interfaces at the point where developers need them, while implementing user acceptance testing in parallel.
Ensuring a strong user voice on the team can be difficult in real-world projects. Real users have their own work to do—it can be hard to get them to commit enough time to provide the detailed guidance an agile process envisions. Furthermore, users don’t typically reflect on their own work and strategies—they need techniques that help them articulate their work so they can understand their true needs and the implications of a new system.
All this has to fit into the basic structure of an Agile project—quick iterations, each delivering a chunk of user value. There’s no time for Big Design Up Front, yet UX experts know if there’s no UX design and no iteration of that the design with users, the result will be a mess, requiring redesign and rework in future iterations.
The User Feedback Two-Step provides a structure for interleaving UX and development work inside the iterations of an Agile project. We’ll use the User Feedback Two-Step game as a way of teaching UX practitioners (and their development partners) how to dance.
We’ll first lay out the basic problem and then introduce some key techniques:
- An adaptation of Contextual Inquiry for quick discovery of customer issues and problems to drive the next iteration. We’ll introduce key principles and practice a short interview;
- Paper prototyping as a method to quickly design and test user interfaces before developers start implementation. We’ll build a small prototype together and discuss its usage; and
- Interactive Inquiry as a method for quick user acceptance testing of a completed iteration. We’ll talk about how to run and Interactive Interview and give a demo.
Then we’ll play the Two-Step game to show how these three elements can fit into an agile project structure to provide continuous, reliable user feedback with minimal rework. The game will enable participants to play out the process and the different roles, seeing how they dovetail with each other.