Engineering Blog

As a user experience designer at Rally, I’m thinking about 3 things at any given moment:  1) the work that is being developed right now in the current iteration, 2) the work that’s coming up next iteration and 3) the work that is coming up in the next 1-2 releases.

The Current Iteration

In order to avoid blocking the development team, my first priority is making myself available to answer questions and remove ambiguity from designs and acceptance criteria that may come up once implementation begins.  And for every user story that impacts the UI (most of which do), I have an explicit “UX Review” task.  To complete this task, I sit with the developer and review the work that was done.  For example, I just sat down with one of our developers this morning and walked through an error message dialogue that can appear after a bulk edit is made.  There were a couple of slight alignment and spacing issues that we identified and Katie quickly fixed these.  If the problem is significant and requires a large amount of development effort or rethinking the design, I work with the product owner to create a new user story to capture the additional work.  The new user story is then ranked accordingly – either to be done in the next iteration or sometime later.  Once the UX task is complete, our tester can perform a manual walk-through on all of our supported browsers.

The Next Iteration

My next priority is the the next iteration.  I frequently review the Backlog to identify what we will likely be working on next and as an extra measure I schedule a weekly meeting with the product owners to formally review the set of candidate user stories for the next iteration.  The assumption that the items are listed in rank order is critical to my work and ensures that I am creating detailed designs and acceptance criteria for the right set of work.  It would be wasteful for me to create detailed designs for work that may not be done for several weeks and it would much worse still for me to enter in to an iteration without a solid design for the team.

It’s a delicate dance, however.  Since story size is often dependent on the design and what will fit in an iteration depends on size there is often quite a bit of negotiation that goes on between developers, product owners and myself in preparation for the next iteration.  For example, if I create a design option A that is estimated at 10 points and design option B that is estimated at 5 points, we will weigh the options carefully.  Our developers are very accustomed to me asking them to take a look at a design and tell me how difficult it would be to implement.  Very often, they will suggest alternatives that would be technically easier and if an alternative is equally user-friendly, I’m happy to adapt the design.

On occasion the technical difficulty of a particular design does not come out until the formal process of iteration planning.  In these cases, the end result is usually compromised because the adapted design has not had the opportunity to be iterated on or validated.

The Big Picture

I have found that it’s imperative for me to know what is coming in the next 1 to 2 releases for two reasons:  1) to bring a holistic vision in to each design that I create and 2) to be able to plan ahead for larger, riskier features.  Fortunately, the product owners that I work with hold a Product Council meeting every 2 weeks with stakeholders and this allows me to gain insight in to what we will likely be working on in the next couple of releases.  When I’m not working on the current iteration and the next iteration, I spend my time thinking about these upcoming features and themes.  I identify which features will need customer research and validation and start to schedule these.  I explore high level design concepts and validate them.  This prep work ensures that I won’t be scrambling to get designs together when the work gets scheduled into an iteration and it also helps create a cohesive user experience over the long term.