The Agile Human Centered Design Toolkit—a set of methods to create high value, customer-first product definition
As consumerism grows and consumer technology advances in parallel, user expectations of the services in their lives continue to increase. For large institutions with significant investments in people, processes, procedures of a former era, turning the corner towards a human centered enterprise can prove challenging.
From as far back as the formation of IDEO and frogdesign, design thinking has been a strategic tool to help teams better understand the nature of the problem to be solved and the value a solution could bring. From finding redundancies and fail points in processes to understanding the fundamental need of an audience that can help retain and grow customers, understanding a problem from the perspective of the human using the service has repeatedly proven to change the trajectory of an enterprise.
As a business change agent, Human Centered Design has become so important most of the multi-national consulting firms from McKinnsey to Deloitte, have created or acquired offerings to guide companies through the transformation. IDEO has created a low cost online university to share the best practices and approaches that have made them so successful with anyone who wants to read and apply them. And people like Jon Kolko, a respected design thinking author and speaker, have written a number of books including his latest—Creative Clarity—on how to apply creative thinking to organizations.
But even with all that, figuring out where to start can be a challenge for the individual team within an enterprise. Without a budget for a large consulting firm to drive the transformation or the time to invest in fully immersing in all of the literature and training, there is an increaing refrain within many enterprsies to start experimenting with the tools and methods of Human Centered Design. Whether it is to quickly create some customer-oriented inputs to drive an integrated agile design and development process or to shape a business case for future investment, teams need a reliable toolset to get started with the approach.
That’s where this article comes in. In my experience helping to build Thinktiv to through our work at Inquiri and now directing digital experiences in a large health enterprise, I have found that the following set of twelve design thinking tools can enable a cross-functional group to get the benefit of human centered design thinking in very short time periods. Similar to the concept of discount usability pioneered by the Nielsen/Norman Group 30 years ago, Agile HCD relies on Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) within the organization to draw on their years of experience representing the population to define the audiences and articulate the unique needs of each group. Ethnographic research and other customer immersion methods can be used to validate and optimize the solution as it matures.
Starting an initiative with the Agile Human Centered Design Toolkit helps teams create stakeholder and product team alignment by visualizing what would otherwise be a long list of requirements. It also creates organizational memory that can guide the solution from inception to delivery—and into continuous improvement—by connecting team members emotionally to the problem and each other.
Even if delivered in a single two hour meeting or a single sprint, the toolkit can quickly give form and context to a problem so that the team and the stakeholders have a clear understanding of what they might get as the solution is developed. Delivered typically in sequence, these methods provide critical inputs to epic and story definition of an agile delivery team. Specifically, it provides:
These methods work together to frame a problem into a testable, buildable, “launchable” product hypothesis.
Six Questions are the strategic foundation needed to align teams around the business outcomes for a project or initiative AND the needs of the users that project will impact.
Each of these questions helps define the problem space, allowing teams to faithfully commit to a creative and thoughtful process of discovery with a clear concept of how the output will be evaluated. Teams should continuously revisit these questions throughout a project to ensure the work is aligned to the goal.
The following questions should be answered in sequence:
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
Note:
It answers “why does this matter?” and demonstrates why a customer would choose this thing (product, service, etc.) over alternatives. To create it, you must have an understanding of both the customer, their expectations and the alternatives they have.
The value proposition isn’t just messaging, it is:
This exercise helps teams find clarity and focus on the user by aligning business strategy and user needs, while also minimizing the risk of creating a flop and avoid wasting time. Strategyzer has a great set of tools.
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
Users are the participants of the journey that either directly or indirectly have an affect on the outcome. Defining the base set is important to ensure that the solution accounts for the information and data they contribute to or collect from the journey.
A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal user based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Personas provide tremendous structure and insight for your company. A detailed persona will help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across the organization. As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business.
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
A customer or member has a long relationship with a business. The journey list is the list of those journeys that represent that relationship.
Within a large complex organization, the number of journeys can be large. The journey list is an exercise to get co-design teams to imagine discrete moments within the broader member experience where a solution could be presented to improve that moment.
As a quick warm up exercise, the list of journeys should then be prioritize based on the goals and timelines of the work effort to deliver the most value from the exercise.
The journey list from every design thinking exercise should be add ed to a master catalog until it can be developed as its own journey.
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal tied to a specific business or product. It’s used for understanding and addressing customer needs and pain points.
In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user goals and actions into a timeline skeleton. Next, the skeleton is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. Finally, that narrative is condensed into a visualization used to communicate insights that will inform design processes.
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
Similar to brainstorming, event storming is a workshop-based method to quickly find out what is happening in the domain of a software program.
Using the journey map as an input, the business process is “stormed out” as a series of domain events which are denoted as orange stickies.
The basic idea is to bring together software developers and domain experts and learn from each other. To make this learning easier, Event Storming is meant to be fun.
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
User flow is the path taken by a prototypical user in a journey to complete a task. The user flow takes them from their entry point through a set of steps towards a successful outcome and final action, such as purchasing a product.
Their origins are flow charts, but through years they have been enriched with more visual elements wireframes/mockups or gesture visualization.
UX Flows are hybrid between traditional flow charts with some visual interfaces included in them. They focus on a task to be accomplished by the user and eventual alternative paths.
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
As a follow up to the user flow, the happy path is a set of screenshots that sequence the steps taken to complete common actions within a product.
Hero flows must consider controls, data, information, and support that enables the user to complete the task. They become the inputs to the definition of epics when developers look to understand the base capabilities of the flow and all of the variations and edge cases needed to deliver on that flow.
This also leads to the AUXP workstreams where designers and developers specify all the variations in the spec needed to deliver a working solution.
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
Feature audits will help you understand the features that exist in existing or are proposed for new products.
The audit is a hierarchical list of capabilities within the product that describe what a user can achieve from a particular feature.
Once created in a list, it should be converted to a matrix that maps the feature to use by number of people and frequency of use. Looking at features though this lens allows product owners to consider removing unnecessary features, increasing the adoption rate, and increasing the frequency of usage.
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
A user story is a tool used in Agile software development to capture a description of a software feature from an end-user perspective. The user story describes the type of user, what they want and why. A user story helps to create a simplified description of a requirement.
In software development and product management, a user story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system. User stories are often written from the perspective of an end user or user of a system. They are often recorded on index cards, on Post-it notes, or in project management software. Depending on the project, user stories may be written by various stakeholders including clients, users, managers or development team members.
User stories are a type of boundary object. They facilitate sensemaking and communication, that is, they help software teams organize their understanding of the system and its context.
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
Competitive analysis is the collection and review of information about rival solutions. It’s an essential tactic for finding out what your competitors are doing and what kind of threat they present to your solution well-being.
It provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. The framework focuses on the following key attributes:
1.Determine who the competitors are
2.Determine who the customers are and what benefits they expect
3.Determine the key strengths — for example price, service, convenience, inventory, etc.
4.Rank the key success factors by giving each one a weighting — The sum of all the weightings must add up to one
5.Rate each competitor on each of the key success factors
6.Multiply each cell in the matrix by the factor weighting
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
Because of the complexity of most consumer interactions, even the best most intuitive experiences involve language to provide context. Content strategy refers to the planning, development, and management of content — written or in other media. This content is the information that is needed to attract, convert close, inform, or delight users inside of journeys and experiences.
Service journeys contain a number of touchpoints — both analog and digital — where content is required to deliver on the action. Establishing a foundation, understanding our audience, and mapping journeys to the consideration phases to better understand how content supports decision-making, and defining the measurable content variables.
Planning for content is required as a part of a successfully delivered experience as humans primarily interact with content within the context of a product experience. Success or failure in that experience is based on the comprehension of that user.
Characteristics
Why use it
When to use it
Becoming a truly Human centered enterprise can take a while. Making use of a practical toolset can be all the difference in building the confidence within teams and the measurable outcomes to advocate within the organization. these have always worked well for me but I look forward to hearing how they work in other businesses. Feel free to connect with me to share your thoughts.
The Agile Human Centered Design Toolkit—a set of methods to create high value, customer-first product definition
Research & References of The Agile Human Centered Design Toolkit—a set of methods to create high value, customer-first product definition|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
Source
0 Comments