ExperienceOps: continuous design in agile teams

About this Hands-On

This session is split into 2 practical exercises, each preceded by a 20-minute discussion of aspects of ExperienceOps.

1. UX and devs: complementarity and multistability of perspectives, good DevOps practices and UX

Development is a mature profession. Tools and techniques have been developed over the last 50 years to help manage developers' attention and augment their ability and creativity in fascinating ways.

Many UXers work in a world built by devs, for devs. And that's okay. This part of the discussion will look at:

• the concept of multistability, gestalt shifts and complementarity
• a survey of dev perspectives and attention-management techniques vs UX perspective
• problems of 'synchronisation' and focus (as well as benefits)
• a survey of DevOps/agile tools and how they augment developer capability
• XP and the 'clean coder' and other sensible dev practices
• examples of patterns and anti-patterns in UX tools and processes
• UX foundational documents and deliverables
• what UX should steal from DevOps and how to make that happen
• Design System Ops (overview of some good practice at Salesforce, FT, game design studios, design agencies, GDS and elsewhere)

Hands-on exercise:

The development of a VisionType (a product prototype in the form of a landing page, press release, blog post, storyboard or design fiction) for an ExOps future.

2. Deeper exploration into design systems

Some organisations have done some impressive work on developing new tools and techniques to make agile/continuous design at scale work well.

What do those tools and strategies look like? We'll discuss:

• case studies of organisations who've made ExOps or similar work
• some inspiration from newer tools (from outside UX)
• some inspiration from newer tools (from the design world)
• focus on accessibility, 'non-functional design' and the grain of digital / software materials

Hands-on exercise:

Sketch/prototyping of a 'JIRA but for ExOps' to answer the question of how you deliver consistently well-researched, accessible, performant, responsive, resilient designs continuously and at scale.

About the Speaker

Simon Bostock is a service designer, UX architect and product manager working as an associate on agile transformation projects with Equal Experts.

Recent work has been on award-winning Government Digital Service 'exemplar' projects (Home Office, HMRC), as well as work in developing design and product management capability in newly-forged continuous delivery environments with organisations in the financial services sector.

He has a passion for work in 'continuous everything' agile teams and is currently working on developing a transdisciplinary community of delivery specialists interested in the theme of 'DevOps mindset for designers' (working title: ExOps).

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