| Date: | 3 December 2015 |
| Where: | London |
Evolution of User Centred Design at Credit Suisse
In 2011 Credit Suisse hosted an IIBA event where we explored where UX techniques could be adopted by Business Analysts and what challenges we were being faced with. Since then there has been significant focus around leveraging User Centred Design Techniques broadly - not as a differentiator but an expected part of solution design. As part of our career development, training and certification program we have leveraged BABOK with great success - how do we now factor UX techniques as part of this?
Jake shares details of our journey in establishing this cohesive approach and our initial curriculum that Business Analysts can leverage to create impactful client experiences.
Jake Markham is a Director in the Client Technology group at Credit Suisse, working across a number of external and internal programs. The Business Analysis & Design Group have built a reputation for their User-Centred Approach to requirements definition and consultative Software Development, through engagement with the stakeholders and iterative prototyping and design. Jake has been involved in Business Analysis and User Centred Design for over 20 years working at Barclays, ING Barings and Credit Suisse.
Bringing projects to life through rapid prototyping
Design and build projects are often difficult to kick-off, especially when you're struggling to convey your ideas and understand the solutions being suggested. This can lead to delays, confusion and potential rework. Rapid prototyping provides a quick and visual solution to identifying, documenting and validating project requirements in an interactive way
In this session Jamie takes you through examples of rapid prototypes and shows you how this approach can bring your projects to life and reduce development time, costs and help to maintain your relationship with your clients.
Jamie Clouting is a Principal Business Analyst at LateRooms.com, with a focus on user experience and data analytics. A keen BA blogger and volunteer for the IIBA North Branch, he works with the LateRooms.com BA practice to share best practice and mentor BAs. Follow Jamie on Twitter @jamieclouting.
Panel Q&A
After the talks there was a panel Q&A, taking questions from the audience. The panel comprised Jake Markham, Jamie Clouting, Nick de Voil & Vassilis Stavridis. Here are some answers to some of the questions that we didn't have time for on the evening.
Q: What are the key challenges for IT delivery teams to move to rapid prototyping, especially in the Business Intelligence/ Analytics domain?
Jamie: Rapid prototyping supports quick decision making and fast paced change. Often the problems I find in an organisation is an inability to make decisions or change fast enough, even when they have the data to hand. I would hope that BI/Analytical teams would be in a better place than most to respond to these changes, after all, Rapid Prototyping requires data to validate a successful prototype/variant has been created and these teams are probably closer to this than many.
Q: To what extent (i.e. with what success) is the discipline of Rapid Prototyping (i.e. the subject matter of the talk) now applied to the production of systems deemed business critical?
Jamie: I can't speak for the industry as whole but at LateRooms we're an ecommerce business and the first thing we really prototyped was our checkout, the till where customers come to pay. That's about as business critical as it gets for us, if we can't take money the shop is effectively shut. Prototyping helped us massively in speeding up the design process but also identifying issues and implementing enhancements before we put the booking form into production.
Q: What are the best low cost prototyping tools available and which would you recommend please?
Jamie: My personal favourite (and the ones I use the most) are paper and pens. The next time you need a notepad buy one with squared paper and get some good pens (I live the Sharpie fine point ones) and use them for taking your normal notes in. And then when you're in a position to elaborate a requirement you can draw it and ask for feedback. If you're looking to try digital tools, start with visio (assuming you use it), chances are you already know how it works, your company have already paid the license and there are lots of good stencils out there to use.
Nick: +1 for paper and pens, but also I absolutely love Balsamiq. This is a tool for producing digital low-fidelity mockups. The mockups' low fidelity nature is massively helpful from a psychological point of view. If the stakeholder can see that the artefact is quite obviously not supposed to be the finished article because it doesn't even have straight lines, it frees their mind from getting hung up on visual details, and lets them focus on the concepts and interactions. On the other hand, because the mockups are digital, you get the ability to copy and paste, which means you can produce a large set of mockups in a very short space of time, and to combine them in a larger document, for example to map out a user journey.
Q: Will this approach be more suitable to agile or waterfall environment?
Jamie: I would say it is better suited to agile, not because the technique is any less successful in waterfall projects, but just because you will find it easier when engaging with business stakeholders.
Q: How do you manage to innovate and rapidly prototype in risk averse or conservative large organisations that are slightly challenging to new design or services?
Jamie: Remember what the BABOK Guide says, Prototyping is about identifying, documenting and validating requirements. If I were working in this environment I would start by trying to use prototypes to capture better requirements and to ensure they are well documented and validated. Once your stakeholders become comfortable with prototypes as a visual representation of their requirements, you may be able to start to promote potential solutions or options to your stakeholders with them.
Q: What does the future look like for rapid prototyping and its role in projects across insurance and financial industries?
Jamie: While I don't know specifically about the Insurance & Financial industry, all my experience tells me that traditional specification writing with lots of up-front analysis is dead, if not dying. The insurance sector is highly competitive and the need to be able to respond to market changes and in some cases they want to be first to market with products and services, prototyping can help this. It can also support faster digital transformation with a move to "digital by default" to reduce the operational overhead of offline changes and modifications.
Nick: Yes, rapid prototyping has been an essential part of my work with capital markets participants for a long time and I'm sure it will continue to be. I think on some projects there will always be a need for some kind of functional specification documents, but they're more likely to be good if they've been preceded by a prototyping phase.
Q: How does Rapid Prototyping and User Centred Design work with different approaches within a fast paced and ever changing Project Environment where Business priorities keeps changing on a day to day basis?
Jamie: Rapid prototyping is rarely about recreating the wheel or starting from scratch. It's much more often about smaller changes to an existing system or process. So for me, I would say that Rapid Prototyping supports changes in fast paced and ever changing Project Environment where Business priorities keeps changing. That would certainly be my experience at LateRooms and we use techniques like this to do JIT analysis and communicate the change and the requirements so that we are not holding the business up.
Q: What have you found to be the most effective tools to the aid rapid prototyping in context with subsequent requirements, design specifications, coding and then testing? Have you found anything that helps expedite this workflow (particularly around the coding of designs)?
Jamie: I've spent many years using tools such as Axure to work on low, medium and high fidelity prototypes to speed up the requirements documentation and specification writing phases of the project. However, the HTML produced is poor at best. If you truly want to speed up the coding of designs, you need to build your very first prototype in HTML, or whatever the suitable technology is, so that you can maximise reuse and reduce the effort in the development phase.
Q: What are the key differences in your workflows when working with Agile and Waterfall project frameworks?
Jamie: My workflows tend to not change that much, however, agile workflows lend themselves to iterating on smaller 'chunks' on analysis whereas a waterfall project may require me to deal with a lot of this upfront. I have prototyped in waterfall projects and the output has usually been screens or diagrams from my prototype end up in my annotated spec. Whereas on agile projects my experience has been that my annotated prototype is the spec.
Q: What are your views on the frequent case of a UX team of 1, as it quite often is within both project spaces and institutions, vs. Business Analysts taking on a broad understanding of such techniques?
Jamie: The key for me is about techniques. The roles of BA & UX to me are a collection of skills that closely overlap. We are both attempting to capture requirements (needs/wants) from individuals and in many cases we might be using similar tools & techniques. Working closely and supporting where possible will really help.
Q: It feels as though there is a slight overlap between the role of the BA in rapid prototyping and customer experience teams. How do we differentiate the roles and remits? Are BA's starting to take on CE skills?
Nick: I agree with you - there's a considerable overlap, and so should there be. In many cases BA's are starting to develop awareness of customer experience and the associated skills. Differentiating the roles is something for each organisation to think about within its own context - I'm much more interested in bringing disciplines together than fencing them off from each other. Customer experience and service design are two areas that business analysts can learn a lot from. I believe that in the future we may see a more all-embracing profession of Enterprise Design which includes elements of change management, business analysis, service design and customer experience.
Q: What relationships does the IIBA have with other groups and associated with more 100% focus on user experience and usability? How do you see this developing over the next 5 years?
Nick: IIBA UK has an excellent relationship with UXPA UK, the UK chapter of the international User Experience Professionals Association. We have run a couple of joint events with them - the first one was referred to by Jake in his presentation, and the second one was in January this year. We've agreed in principle to hold more joint events - this type of collaboration with other professional bodies is an explicit part of our strategy.
Q: Can you recommend the BCS' new User Experience qualification or any other courses on Business Analysis and UX?
Nick: I'm excited about the BCS' new User Experience qualifications. In some ways they're the culmination of a long process which started with a BCS workshop I attended in 2010 with the aim of defining a User Experience Competency Framework. Take a look at the syllabus - it's on the BCS website - and see if it looks like something you'd be interested in. From another point of view, it's early days - there aren't actually any public exams scheduled yet. As regards other courses, I'm only aware of one course on business analysis and UX, which is the one I teach myself!
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