Essential UX Layers for Agile and Lean Design Teams

By Jared M. Spool

"It was puzzling to see how our team was so wrong in this design. At the time, it had seemed like the team made all the right decisions. But now, seeing the real users interacting with it, our only excuse is we just didn't know what we were doing.

This little piece of the design wasn't really important in the scope of things. It's just a piece of functionality the team threw in, practically at the last minute before launch.

Yet now, before our very eyes, this little piece of design was frustrating the shop owner. In the past week, we'd seen five shop owners frustrated by basically the same piece of design. It was hard for the team members to watch, yet even harder to take our eyes away from it.

The problem to solve is simple: The owner of this tiny shop, which sells fewer than 100 items on its shelves, has just received a new shipment of products. The owner's task is to enter the items into the system, updating the inventory, so the cashiers can ring up charges as customers buy the stuff.

However, it was complicated to add the 15 new products in this box. Click here, type that, verify this, dismiss that other thing. The owner has to enter the order in separately from receiving it, turning a simple process into 2 steps. Most owners we watched didn't do that, instead twiddling the inventory stock values, often incorrectly, making the balance sheet inaccurate.

What should be a five minute process was now 15 minutes. Even worse, we saw several shop owners skip the process altogether. Their future reports and dashboard readings were incorrect which, in turn, was making their cashier's life more difficult and error prone.

This little piece of the design needed an overhaul. And this time, the team would do a much better job."

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