The Design process seems to never quite perfectly fit with scrum teams. There are many reasons for this but the most obvious one is that clients often wanna see the design well before the coding is started to have their say on the final product look.
At SSENSE we recently had to build a CMS for our content team, this project was interesting because our content team creates custom layouts for each article & this is not something you can easily do using a platform like WordPress for example. Unfortunately like too much internal project, time was short. We had to build something fast, iterate fast & deliver it as soon as possible.
A perfect project to be done using scrum & include the design in the process!
About designing one sprint ahead
Couple of months ago I spoke about how hard it was for us to find a balance between having the design done directly in the sprint, with demanding stakeholders we had no choice but to move the design one sprint ahead.
However with the CMS we were reign free, I built very strong user stories, very driven on the acceptance criteria & we started our sprint without design.
Our workflow
Front-end does basic wireframe integration based on our grid system
↓
Designer applies styling with css/rework base integration
↓
Integrator adds functionalities
↓
Designer applies styling/rework integration
↓
The team iterate together if any user experience issues popup or we find better solutions.
Obviously that means our designer had to use more his CSS/HTML chops than its Photoshop skills, if your designer is completely unable to use CSS that’s another thing. However we were very fortunate to have a designer than can also code very well & with a good CSS framework, all is possible.
Is it really better?
For us this workflow allowed to find UX issues sooner & iterate faster than our usual workflow, in the end it made us more agile you could say : P.
I really liked how this worked out with the team & everyone seemed happier with the workflow as wells. Now how can we replicate this workflow on all our projects?
Looking at other teams in the wild that do design ahead they are generally not happy with it, it’s not a lack of trying to integrate it, but it’s hard to find solutions to that problem since design involve generally more than the scrum team & stakeholders have generally some control over design & processes.
More ressources about scrum & design processes:
The Sprint Ahead — Sprint Behind Tango
Designing Ahead: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
UX working a Sprint ahead is full of FAIL. Work as a single team instead.
Source: Position Absolute