Software Companies produce faster results due to agile practices and agile as a software development methodology is widely accepted . Teams are productive when they have clear picture about the product roadmap, features and User Stories in a centralized manner. Program Status, Intricate details of every piece of work depicts the health and status of the program/Release. Executives and team members also need a dashboard view of the program under development

Below is an Agile Dashboard created to have a complete view of the release and sprints under a program

The idea behind Agile Dashboard was to have operational efficiency and maintain one single software for tracking every intricate details of a project on the go. I followed IDEO’s Human centered Design Thinking approach which goes this way :

This Design Process talks about a fool proof process of involving users early in the design process and get their valuable feedbacks as early as possible and implement a well tested and validated piece of design.

Agile also follows the same principle of “Fail Fast” which is apparently hidden in this same Design Thinking approach. Fail fast and develop right software products is the outcome of the above said design thinking process.

I conducted Contextual Inquiry in 2 steps. :

Observations were made during sprint planning , lookahead sessions. Users were observed to verify the workflow of User Stories from requirement to DOD.

2. Master-Apprentice model

I sat with the Leadership Team and did some tasks as how they approach to know the exact pain points . They had defined set of needs in mind from this dashboard. However, As always said, users articulate what they need when asked . So users should always be observed and less questioned.

3. Verify assumptions

On the same day , I noted all the points from the session and verified if the observations and interpretations what I made was right with the real users of the product.

LeadershipTeam consisting of Scrum master, Senior managers and engineering team members were clear persona which could be identified. I created personas and designed User jouneys for each of the persona.

I created a User Journey map which depicts the user’s goals and expectations from an agile dashboard. It also shows the process which user takes and the experience the user encounters and the main key pain points in this User journey. Also, “How to Solve?” those pain points and create delightful experience is mentioned.

Paper prototype was made and verified among the users and leadership teams . Among them were also those users who were present at the time of contextual interviews.

Design Modifications:

The users of this Agile dashboard were technically very competent and hence the inputs provided by the team comprised of many good to have features and some very important modifications. So , I compared all the features on 2*2 Matrix to match as which was important to the user and which was important to the business.

The final deliverables were handed off to the developers using Zeplin. The entire design journey took around 3 weeks.

Overall , it was a great learning experience and it also gave me a good insight of processes followed by different teams in the industry. Having worked in a highly self sufficient, high performing agile team, I could retrospect and help the team with some suggestions in the best practices which we follow as well.