The standards of Agile were set out by software engineers for software designers. The creators of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development came up with the mutual comprehension of the issues that engineers faced and the problems that kept development groups from delivering the best product to their clients.
UI/UX design is one of the orders in which Agile methods of working have turned out to be a great deal and more popular. But since Agile was considered as a set of standards to guide software development there has been a debate over how to apply them to UI/UX design.
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What Is The Problem?
Some of the problems that software developers face while supporting Agile software development for UI/UX design are:
- Conflicting desires of quality and the final product
- Absence of proper planning and lack of prioritization of user experience
- Unclear about the role and responsibilities of each member of the UX design team
- Considering UX design as less important than development
- The impression that the technical team is less interested in clients’ needs
- Disconnected from daily activities done by the scrum team
To solve all these problems faced by User Experience designers, Google has developed a methodology to make the UI/UX design process simple and quick and still offer the best product.
The 5 phases of Google methodology includes Unpack, Sketch, Decide, Prototype and Test.
Stage 1: Unpack
Google’s Sprint procedure is intended to be controlled by teams instead of individuals. That means getting everybody together and to ensure that they’re all moving in a similar direction.
In the unpack stage, you unite everybody and unpack all the solutions of the issue inside the team. It can be useful to utilize an external scholar for these meetings – they can then pose the questions important to help individuals focus and ensure that they are understanding each and everything properly and without anybody in the team confused about anything related to their work.
The perfect team will incorporate members from every single function and at all levels of the association, for example, sponsors, senior supervisors, designers, developers, advertisers, marketing and sales, customer support, etc.
You can include various things in your unpack stage such as
- Presentation by senior team members or managers
- Classification and demonstration of problems and possible or available solutions
- Presenting Available Analytical data and competitive reviews
- Details on users or customers problems and proposed solutions for UX design
Stage 2: Sketch
Sketching is considered to be the best option as all the members are not expert in using all the wire-framing tools and if anything changes in the UI/UX design it will not take much of the time to make changes in the sketch.
In stage 2 it’s time to get everything down on paper. When all the team members are on the same page, it’s a great opportunity to split the team members to form different teams and inspire them to begin dealing with the problems. Sketching is an individual effort and everyone in the team are expected to come up with possible solutions for all the problems.
For solving complex issues or problems, you can break up the problem in manageable parts and assign individuals to those parts of the problem rather than assigning them the whole problem to be solved.
As the goal of the sketch is to get as many ideas as possible to deliver the solution. In the case your team is big then all the members in will come up with the ideas. You might need to designate an hour toward the day’s end to select the manageable number of ideas before moving on to the third stage.
Stage 3: Decide
It’s time to converge on a solution. There are many things to be decided then just deciding on which idea will you consider being taken to the prototype phase. You need to decide on how your solutions may conflict with your goals, resources, UX design, abilities, etc.
You can take your decision based on budget, target users, your technology capacity, final business goals. Then you need to do the analysis of each idea you considered and look at the conflicts that it generates, and then creating or coming up with an idea to overcome those conflicts.
You need to have a goal when you review ideas. Will you be considering to take a single idea forward to prototyping or you would select top 5 and take them all forward and decide on which will best suit your client. You need to look at ideas and refine them constantly to eliminate the ideas that are not just going to work in the long run.
Stage 4: Prototype
Make something that is testable. Google prescribes that you utilize Keynote and the accessible formats on Keynotopia to quickly build intelligent models. You can also use any tool as per your requirement. Simply pick one that you can simply use for fast prototyping.
This is the stage where you need to develop a prototype of your product that your clients can test.
In that time, the research team needs to decide the testing timetables and build up the meeting script for that phase.
Stage 5: Test
At this stage, you need to find out what to do next? User experience involves actual users using it. At this stage of your sprint, you can go to some of your testing team and take their feedback as they use the prototype.
All the members of the testing team need to make notes and record what they feel or what was their experience using the prototype. You need to collect the reports from the testing team. This can help you choose what needs to be improved and what can be taken forward towards building the final product.
The Google Design Sprint Process for UX Design Process includes 5 stages. Every stage takes around 1 day to perform (8 hours) and each of the 5 stages takes roughly 40 hours to execute in full.