While the last few blog entries were focused on supermarkets and the overall topic of cash registers this time I would like to once again talk about the other aspect of my research topic: How to balance design ideas with IT and business goals.
What is agile?
One focal point I would like to discuss today is agile management. Agile is the opposite of the waterfall method. In waterfall requirements are defined and the design happens before the development of any code. As the term waterfall already promotes: there’s no going back. Once the requirements are set there’s no possibility of exploring new ones. However, especially in the human centered context new pain points of a product could be discovered in various stages of the research and design process. In contrast agile makes early involvement with the dev team possible. Small teams are working on a project and the objectives are being discussed in smaller steps and iterated within so called Design Sprints. [1]
Jira
A major tool teams are using to enable agile work and collaboration is Jira, developed by Atlassian. This tool has a wide range of possibilities. For the sake of this blog entry I will keep it short and simple and outline how one specific aspect within Jira works: User Stories.[2]
Structure of a user story
As a [function of the person] I want to [goal/perform an action] so that [benefit/value]
Example:
As the design team, we want to create a prototype for the MVP supermarketchain #1 so that we can gather feedback from potential users.
A user story consists of a simple statements that outlines the goals to be reached – It has to be mentioned that user stories are the smallest unit of work within a sprint.
From Initiative to Epics to User Stories
The largest units are initiatives, these represent the overall goals over a long time span. Initiatives are commonly defined over periods such as a year. Epics are the next smaller unit and usually define the goals for quarter of a year.
Personals thoughts
According to Jon Yablonski, who looks at different psychological practices from a designers point of view, users can easier digest information once it’s broken down into smaller “chunks”, as he calls them.[3] If we keep this in mind I think that managing tasks via user stories is a powerful tool to keep everyone in a project team focused on their tasks.
Sources
[1]
E. Kavlakoglu, “Agile vs. Waterfall: What’s the Difference? | IBM,” www.ibm.com, Jul. 25, 2024. https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/agile-vs-waterfall
[2]
M. Rehkopf, “User Stories,” Atlassian, 2019. https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/user-stories
[3]
J. Yablonski, “Chunking | Laws of UX,” Laws of UX, 2024. https://lawsofux.com/chunking/
