- Something that really annoys me
about the way some design thinking agencies
engage with their clients
is that they stop with the design,
rather than with any form of usability test verification,
much as a plan for how this design
is going to turn into a working product.
Then they hand that design,
often no more than a small set of sketches or screenshots
off to the client and leave it to them to build it.
Of course, going from a paper prototype
to an agile backlog or any other form of implementation plan
is the bit that causes most teams the biggest headache,
especially if the team members weren't involved
in the whole design thinking process,
they don't understand the justifications
behind the way the design has been created.
Starting the development process
based on someone else's design sketches
is a recipe for disaster.
I've seen it happen several times.
Often a couple of executives get really excited
by the ideas being presented by the design agency
and tell the development team inside the company
to build a product based on those ideas.
But without the verification phase
of paper prototyping and usability testing
and without a clear understanding of the rationale
behind each of the agencies designed decisions
that team is starting from a very difficult position.
It's unlikely they'll ever be able to build a product
that satisfies their executives, let alone the customers
who must ultimately use it.
A much better way to do this work
is for the development team members
to be involved from the beginning.
So the experience customer pain points first hand,
try out design solutions together
and build a common understanding
of the issues and way forward.
Another essential step
is to work out what exactly the team will build
and in what order?
After going through the prototyping and testing process,
the whole team knows what pieces of the product
were most important to customers
and what pieces were just nice to have additions.
The technical people on the team
will already be thinking about
how they can make those things work.
Communications people will be thinking about
how to describe them.
Designers will be considering how to build the interface.
It's time to pull all that information together
into one plan.
At the beginning of the design thinking exercise
we created an experience map
that showed us the present state of the interaction.
It's what we use to extract our pain points and goals.
In fact, it showed the data
that was the basis for everything we built.
Now we'll create a story map
that shows our desired future state of the interaction
and use that to determine the order in which we'll build
each of the pieces that will make that interaction happen.
This story map becomes the basis for our project plan.
You can use it to craft agile stories
or as input for pretty much any other planning
and tracking process.