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This is a short series of articles called “Running the Gauntlet” exploring how organizations can get really good ideas to successfully run the gauntlet through the implementation process.

In this first article, I explore how design is used to deliver ideas to the customer interface through an Agile development process.

How design works most of the time

Mostly, design’s core role is to facilitate other people’s strategy through wireframes and graphics.

When designers create, they’re pitching forward in time to a world that’s different from today.  The most future orientated thinking is “Vision”, tactical “Production” does what it says and in between, usually before a project, there’s design to specify the scope of a project, called “Experience Planning”.  Being clear about these 3 contexts makes it easier to understand what they’re working on and how they’re doing it.

Let’s look at each context in the order they usually happen…

Context 1: Experience Planning

Whilst you might think a good place to start is Vision, most design work tends to start in the middle because the business stakeholders don’t yet know what they want delivered visually.  I call this an Experience Plan because that’s what it is: a plan for the experience the business wants delivered.

Experience Plans should contain strategy, user journeys, sitemaps, creative direction and high-level wireframes to get agreement on overall scope from the business.  Often though the wireframes and concept designs become the focus, and this can be sufficient to initiate the dialogue between business, development and design about scope.

The Experience Plan then provides the basis of collaboration/dialogue between the Dev and Design teams to start prioritizing the effort needed to go into Production.

Context 2: Production

Once an Experience Plan is handed over to Development, leadership comes from the Business Analyst (BA) in the Agile team, they also have complete control over User Experience and Design’s day-to-day deliverables – that’s why you’ll note the graphic above depicts a BA running the Production design activities.

BA’s plan the sprints and define the user stories in each sprint to deliver the plan. These stories provide the basis for functional specs that break down the scope of work into sprint-sized chunks at a minimum of one sprint AHEAD of the developers.

Don’t forget to embed UX and Design into Agile
The best way to get the Experience Plan delivered is to embed design resources into the Agile team, especially when working with resources off/near-shore. A functional spec’s purpose is to translate the Experience Plan into specific interaction behaviours for the interface developers (iDevs). How much detail functional specs describe depends on the level of integration between UX, Graphic Design and the Agile team, especially the iDevs. Other factors that affect the integrity of the original design concept are the level of immersion the Agile team have in the customers’ experience and the clarity of vision provided for the project.

Context 3: Vision

Whilst vision is obviously present in some form (often inside colleagues heads), it’s the precision with which it’s defined and agreed as a visual by all stakeholders that adds or removes risk from a project being delivered well through Agile.

A baseline vision should provide some high level creative direction in the form of one or two key finished pages to illustrate how things should look when complete.  This provides some degree of certainty that things are “on brand” and it gives the production design team embedded in Agile a chance to share their ideas as part of this process, in particular ensuring the style guide is adhered to and question whether the design is evolving in a way that plays to the legacy platform’s strengths.

Wrapping Up

These contexts, starting in the middle with Experience Planning, make Agile design effective.  But doing more Vision work up front shows real design maturity.  I’ll explore Vision in the next article from how you sell it to the business to executing it well.  The 3rd article will cover off the leadership, strategic and cultural factors required for truly brilliant design to emerge with reliable consistency.