Let me share my thoughts on the first item of the six important values we care about. This is the value that can have the maximum impact with all the "User Experience" (UX) initiatives that is going on in our group. Among many, there are three main things that can help us in delighting our users....
1. Simplicity.... it is very powerful! Simplicity fuels many elements of good design, including ease of use, visual appeal, and accessibility. But simplicity starts with the design of a product's fundamental functions. We shouldn't set out to create feature-rich products; our best designs should include only the features that people need to accomplish their goals. Ideally, even solutions that require large feature sets and complex visual designs should appear to be simple as well as powerful. Our teams should think twice before sacrificing simplicity in pursuit of a less important feature. Our product Owners have a big role to play here to ensure that this happens in every project. Our hope should be to evolve products in new directions instead of just adding more features
2. Every millisecond counts. Nothing is more valuable than our application user’s time. Like Google, our pages need to load quickly, with the help of slim code and carefully selected image files. The most essential features and text are placed in the easiest-to-find locations. Unnecessary clicks, typing, steps, and other actions should be eliminated. Our products ask for information only once and include smart defaults. Companies like Google consider speed as a competitive advantage that it doesn't sacrifice without a good reason. Good thing is that we have started to target less than 1 second for a web page to load from New York. But, how about the users in Moscow or Singapore... we need to ensure that they also get faster response time.
3. Focus on our users – their work, their needs. We need to discover our users actual needs, including needs they can't always articulate. With that information, we should create products that solve real user problems. Improving users lives, not just easing step-by-step tasks, should be our goal. More importantly, a well-designed product should be valuable in daily work life. It is not just user interviews that would get us there. Interviews are very important, but we need to get better at analytics (usage stats, support tickets etc.) so that we understand the needs they can’t articulate and that's how we build valuable solutions.
To summarize, we need to delight our users consistently with simple, fast and valuable solutions. We have some good initiatives like the UX interest groups internally that is helping everyone understand this important value. But we need to get to a state where each Scrum team and its PO are thinking in this way.
How are you or your organization thinking about this?
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2 comments:
Simplicity is a continuous process.
If you have an application then there would be space to make it simpler.
Some times it happens to meet the dead line the developers not concentrate on the simplicity of application. But yes they have to revisit the application and try to see how they can improve the process.
We had one example, our users want to run the 800 reports through a single click but the because of infrastructure limitation or tool limitation they have to run the 800 reports in 4 chunk 200 reports.
Then they ready to run 4 chunks but the process became complicated.
Then we rethink about how to make that process simpler.
We found one interesting thing in our reporting tool that is creating the job.
The job would run all four chunks users just need to click the button of the job instead of running all the four individual chunks.
So just revisit your application and rethink to make process simpler.
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