product design | Elisabeth Hubert

Maybe Agile REALLY Isn’t for Everyone

Published on August 12, 2013

Part of the 5 Minutes a Day blog series

Intern Kofi passed along this link to me saying that it would be a great topic for a post for the site. Normally, I’d love to write a long piece on something like this in order to really dig into my thoughts BUT, time will not allow it. Instead we’re going to review this piece in five minutes (or less).

The main takeaway is that Uber, a traditionally agile shop, stopped its process for the sake of its marketing and future product. They realized that Agile is great for software development, not so great for marketing (something I’ve touched on before), and therefore stopped their engines (pun intended) and did something unheard of. They actually went back to waterfall to rethink their site.

Wow! Finally someone is publicizing this. I’ve been saying for a long time that process for process sake (i.e. using Agile just because it’s a new trend, saves time, etc) is no good, but that is just what many of our companies are doing. Unfortunately for us UXers and designers, we are the ones that usually feel the most pain for this effort.

But, imagine a place where someone says, “hey maybe this process just won’t work. Maybe we should try something else?”.

I don’t hate Agile. I just hate the misuse of it. I hate that we don’t think about the places and times to use it, and instead try to force the square peg into the freakin round hole. I hate that we don’t think before we do, but most of all I hate that we can’t talk about it freely, without getting kick back from the Agile champions (well at least most of them). What do you think?

Pssst I’m looking for Guest Bloggers. Could this be you?

Service Design or User Experience Design…What’s the diff?

Published on October 3, 2012

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about how a lack of service design got under my skin. In the article, I talked about a trip I had to a popular beauty brand’s store. A couple of months later, I found this article which details how Sephora updated their website experience to better accommodate online shoppers. But I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘what are they doing to help their in store experience?’. Enter service design.

As I mentioned in my previous article, I’m still on the fence regarding whether service design should be separate from user experience design. I think the main issue with it being this way is that user experience design gets construed as ‘designing for the mobile or web interface only’ by both UX practitioners and those that hire us. Thus, UXers begin to leave out the service part of their solution, either because they are oblivious that it is their responsibility or because their boss tells them that the service part of the solution is for the service designer to figure out. Because of this a gap in the product forms between the web and any other channel experiences. In the case of Sephora, this could be ringing true.

I would say that the solution to this problem is to stop separating service design from user experience design, but that opportunity has already passed. The title user experience designer has fallen flat, and has been misconstrued so many times that many people don’t even want it anymore. Service design provides an out in this way, and allows people to work on different types of projects besides just the interface ones. However, I do think that one solution to this problem is for all of us in this profession who design for a user’s experience with a product or service to go back to basics and really understand the pillars that this profession stands on. To me, these are the pillars of Information Architecture: users, content, context. Understanding that we design for the intersection of these three things covers most any situation one can imagine, and brings us back to our discipline’s center.

The outcome of us going back to these pillars, is that we, as service providers, become aware of what our job really is. It is to facilitate, as best as possible, a user’s experience with a product or service. No matter what we call ourselves, that will never change. And, the sooner we all become aware of this, the sooner we can stop creating and arguing about new disciplines, and just sit down and get to work.