Agile UX — From Ungrounded Expectations to User Experience

We all form assumptions in one way or another. I have to admit that I’m making assumptions quite often. Assuming that people know what I know, and then getting surprised when they obviously don’t. In product development, we form assumptions about our users’ behaviours, attitudes, pain points. In teams where agile methodologies prevail, we have “ungrounded expectations” of what we think we should build. The question is how do we move our focus from one UX (Ungrounded Expectations) to another UX(User Experience) in agile environments?

From feature-centric…

Agile is a mindset, a philosophy that requires a constant adaptation to the situation at hand. In some way, promoting inductive reasoning, and that’s why it’s no wonder that it’s ascribed to be originating from the father of empiricism, Francis Bacon (1620).

In environments with an agile mindset, development happens iteratively, in gradual additions. From an MVP, small increments are made to achieve a product that creates value for the customer. Mind you, not the end-user. The underlying idea is that the future cannot be predicted, so rather than focusing on developing it all at once, teams focus on smaller steps and build it up gradually. The emphasis is on adding features and creating products the right way, that work well and satisfy the customer’s requirements.

… and user-centric

Building a product without understanding the users can lead to doomed products. Adding more features is not always better and a perfectly working product might not be exactly what an end-user needs, and plummets in the market. Early user research is important. Even later in the process, some sort of expectations are warranted even if ungrounded. So these can be validated accordingly through user research. What to build gets clearer and based on evidence the end-product becomes usable and meaningful. This shift in focus supports the coexistence of user-centred mindset alongside the agile one.

… to Agile UX: building the right product in the right way

How does it work? In Agile UX, the Scrum loop inspection, adaptation and transparency (IAT) can be adopted:

Inspect
First, you start with inspecting the current situation. Investigating what it is now without looking at the past or the future. It means exploring what the end-users are doing, not what they’re saying. The usual UX problem: what people say they do and what they do are totally different!

Adapt
Follows from inspection. It means that you should make adjustments as a result of what you inspect.

Transparency
Throughout the whole process, ensure that you see the full picture and not only a part of the elephant. This was a nice analogy recounted by Adrie Dolman who introduced me to Agile UX. He was referring to the Blind men and an elephant parable, that depicts that we all see only part of the reality and only by communicating we can see the full picture.

With IAT in place, we have moved from using only Ungrounded Expectations to really centring around User Experience. Both Agile (building the right way) and UX (building the right product) focus on creating value. By adding the user-centric mindset to the agile one, you concentrate on understanding the end-user’s goals and aim for optimising the overall user experience.