5 Elements of User Experience

Having re-instated my membership with the Interactive Design Foundation, I thought it was a good idea to brush up on my UX Design and Agile processes. Whilst I have experience in both of these areas, I want to ensure I’m keeping up-to-date in my knowledge and remembering some of the elements I might have previously forgotten!

As a Digital Product Owner (and part Product Manager and Project Manager!), I want to continually adapt to the processes within a business, knowledge base and ever-changing roadmap for product delivery. Having a clear understanding of what others do in this process can help me to support them, along with delivery of the Product itself.

We have a lot of internal conversations about the 5 Elements of User Experience (Jesse James Garrett) and bringing this into our processes for the on-going digital rebuild. Who owns it, where it sits and how we all follow best practice.

Credit: unsplash

In practical terms, when working across multiple teams (internal and external) with a variety of experience with UX and Agile, it can be difficult to ensure these are easy to translate to the day-to-day.

Whilst running through the UX Course with IDF, I have been trying to find ways to apply this to my current workloads and different streams for our digital rebuild. Ultimately, we’re a wine and spirits brand that uses tech. Not a tech company that sells wine. Making it really important to make these processes and steps understandable to the masses. Not just the nerds!

Using the 5 elements as a basis: Strategy (objectives), Scope (requirements), Structure (architecture) Skeleton (wireframes) and Surface (visual design), I’m creating a document to provide the clear purpose for this elements, and clear outputs that the team can work too.

Current work in progress

The Output phase is not a meeting, but what should be produced within that element as something tangible. It could contain a variety of meetings, workshops, documents. Each output will have its own, more detailed, documentation on what is expected.

The purpose of this document, is that is is top-level, easy to review and there to help team members understand their level of involvement with a workstream. Regardless of their experience in this type of process.

Who needs to be involved in this process?

I doubt it is uncommon in other organisations; there are many people involved in a big rebuild/replatforming project. However, they don’t all have a day -to-day role within it. We’re no exception here, and we have many stakeholders, business owners, business sponsors and SMEs that need to be kept up-to-date as things progress.

Too many cooks

If you tried to get everyone into meetings and workshops, it would be impossible. The meeting would be difficult and there would be far too many voices to be heard. The purpose of these groups of people is to acknowledge the need to be updated, but to agree on the communications channels to do it. Here, we use Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook and Confluence.

The core group

The A Team

After creating the groups of people that need to be updated, there are then a much tighter group of individuals involved in the more day-to-day approach:

• Meetings and workshop attendees - expected attendance at all required meetings and workshops

• Sign off - these are the agreed people across the business that will sign-off the outcome, and agreed the Definition of Done. This might not be final sign-off, but an understanding that everyone is happy to move onto the next stage.

At the start of a project, having this type of document in place helps to manage everyone’s expectations on what their role is, what they are expected to do and when they are expected to feedback.

Depending on the size of your organisation, these could be different people. Or in smaller ones these roles will cross over.

Working with other systems

This is a fairly broad overview, and isn’t a guide to how to run a large project. Next up is looking at the agreed processes and systems in place - such as Design and understanding how these can work together.

This is still a work in progress, and will change and adapt based on the direction the business takes. But its a first stab and trying to provide a lot of clarity to everyone who is involved.