[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-10-12-":3},{"paginated":4,"total":2023},[5,188,260,386,537,695,964,1135,1389,1463,1652,1839],{"id":6,"title":7,"author":8,"body":9,"categories":172,"date":175,"description":176,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":179,"meta":180,"navigation":181,"path":182,"previewImage":183,"seo":185,"stem":186,"tags":178,"__hash__":187},"blog/blog/agility-is-mutual-respect.md","Agility is Mutual Respect","Axure",{"type":10,"value":11,"toc":167},"minimark",[12,32,35,38,41,44,47,50,53,56,61,64,95,98,101,104,107,114,117,120,123,130,138,147,150,153,158,161,164],[13,14,15],"p",{},[16,17,18,19,26,27,31],"em",{},"(This article is adapted from a talk I gave in September 2016 at UC San Diego, organized by ",[20,21,25],"a",{"href":22,"rel":23},"http://www.meetup.com/s-d-x-d/",[24],"nofollow","San Diego Experience Design",". I shared ",[20,28,30],{"href":29},"/blog/203-inside-axure-developing-subscription-update-axure-customer-portal.html","another portion of the talk"," last month.)",[13,33,34],{},"Does Axure practice Agile software development? The short answer: yes and no. For the long answer, read on.",[13,36,37],{},"We definitely wouldn't qualify as a strict Scrum Agile shop. And we aren't Lean, in the formal sense of that term. (Though we do feel pretty lean, to me, in the informal sense.) We don't do stand-up meetings; our formal development meetings are once per two weeks, not daily. We don't do formal pair programming. We don't do formal sprints.",[13,39,40],{},"So what do we do that's Agile? Lots and lots of face-to-face conversations among and between the development and product teams. There's a lot of trust between teams, and we actively foster that. Trust is the best thing we've found for positively impacting motivation. And motivation, in turn, is the parameter of our work environment which we've found correlates best with productivity and quality of output. So we invest however we can in maintaining ourselves as a highly motivated group of people.",[13,42,43],{},"We very much welcome changing requirements. We're always on the lookout to make sure the solutions we're coming up with are solving the problems they're intended to solve—and if they aren't, we adjust. Even late in the cycle, during our (quite lengthy) beta periods, we're careful to maintain enough flexibility to evaluate changes.",[13,45,46],{},"We practice continuous delivery (ready to release a current version of the software at any time), though not continuous deployment (releasing every day via an automated system). We do deploy incremental builds sometimes, within our larger framework of major releases. We do a lot more of that toward the front end of a release and less as the release matures. And we've actually been working to reduce the number of incremental releases per cycle, for a number of reasons.",[13,48,49],{},"To elaborate: over time we've gone from shorter betas, earlier releases, rapid updating and bug fixing, to longer betas, later general releases, and fewer but more substantive post-release updates. We've also begun to release our higher-risk builds via a release candidates channel. So the RC is now for the people who want to be on the latest and greatest with every bug fix, and the general release builds are the super-stable ones that big companies can be sure will be safe to install and standardize on.",[13,51,52],{},"When the dev team deploys, there's a certain amount of overhead to each new build. So there are benefits internally and externally from releasing better builds less often. With fewer builds going live, we can now dedicate less time to the overhead of managing releases. We've decided that this leads to us releasing higher-quality software overall.",[13,54,55],{},"So: are we Agile? Yes and no. And that's okay.",[57,58,60],"h2",{"id":59},"agility-is-context-dependent","Agility is context-dependent",[13,62,63],{},"By contrast, the various prescribed Agile and Agile-like frameworks—just as with any set of best-fit guidelines—are context-independent.",[65,66,67,71,74,77,80,83,86,89,92],"ul",{},[68,69,70],"li",{},"Scrum",[68,72,73],{},"Lean",[68,75,76],{},"Kanban",[68,78,79],{},"XP (Extreme Programming)",[68,81,82],{},"DSDM (Dynamic System Development Model)",[68,84,85],{},"Crystal Methods",[68,87,88],{},"SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)",[68,90,91],{},"DAD (Disciplined Agile Development)",[68,93,94],{},"Spiral",[13,96,97],{},"And by context-independent, I mean that each of these frameworks was devised to apply broadly to a wide range of software projects. They're like off-the-rack suit jackets: they fit some of us quite well and many of us fairly well, but a bit of tailoring—or an entirely bespoke alternative—will almost always cut a better figure.",[13,99,100],{},"Of course these frameworks do have value, even to those of us who aren't strict adherents: they're sets of good ideas, from which successful teams pick and choose.",[13,102,103],{},"And yes, the way we do it at Axure, there are some waterfall model practices mixed in there as well. I know that may be heresy to say out loud in 2016, but stay with me.",[13,105,106],{},"We talk to customers all the time about this. Axure RP is used by lots of teams who describe themselves as Agile to some degree, but the Axure RP work may not actually happen in the sprints; it happens in the pre-sprints. Pre-sprint planning, or pre-project planning. Sprint Zero. Sprint Ahead. Or they'll call it \"backlog grooming\", but in the end it's quite a lot like the traditional waterfall practices of product requirements planning and design.",[13,108,109,110,113],{},"And these customers generally aren't doing two-week sprints or cycles. Much more typical for our customers are six-week or even six-month cycles. Some of the customers we speak to are anxious about Agile. They're perpetually trying to transition to a \"pure\" Agile approach, but never getting there. Other teams are comfortable with, and prefer, their six-month cycles. They're accomplishing good work, the team's spirits are good, and two-week sprints just sound like needless strife and chaos to them. And at least it's not the two-year cycles they used to have. It's ",[16,111,112],{},"relatively"," agile.",[13,115,116],{},"At Axure, we build software, but we're different from many of our customers in that our software is used to build other software. So we've got two perspectives on process management methodology: from running our own process, and also from talking to customers about how we fit into their processes.",[13,118,119],{},"When it comes to our own process, we don't speak in Agile terminology much at the office. You'll only overhear someone at Axure HQ speaking in terms of \"sprints\" if they're on the phone with a customer who practices Agile. Each team develops a process that's best for them. In our case, we've been building Axure RP since 2002, so we've learned a lot over the years about what works best for us.",[13,121,122],{},"The principles of the Agile Manifesto boil down to communication and accountability. Everything else follows.",[13,124,125,126,129],{},"You could call what we do \"loose agile\". It's highly iterative. There are regular check-ins, though they generally aren't scheduled. We rely on the ",[16,127,128],{},"esprit de corps"," and motivation of the team, the idea that everybody on the team wants the work done. So we try to keep team spirit as high as we can, and we open up communication among and between teams as much as we can, and then allow the process to happen as organically as possible within that framework.",[13,131,132,133,137],{},"You could summarize by saying that ",[134,135,136],"strong",{},"it's a culture of mutual respect",". If the dev team says they need time to re-architect something, the product team believes them. And vice versa if the product team needs time to rethink, to change a requirement.",[13,139,140,141,146],{},"Now, this may sound like a dodge. What does mutual respect have to do with choosing Scrum vs. Lean? Here's the connection: if you look at ",[20,142,145],{"href":143,"rel":144},"http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html",[24],"the principles of the Agile Manifesto",", they essentially boil down to communication and accountability. Everything else follows.",[13,148,149],{},"Simplicity, for example. If the team is communicating freely and everyone feels accountable for the end product, there's a minimum of wasted effort. You don't have people accidentally working on the wrong thing, or intentionally not producing because they aren't motivated, or not sure what to work on because they're scared to ask.",[13,151,152],{},"Continuous delivery is about keeping your sights on project goals and staying on track and keeping motivation up. Two-year software projects are inherently depressing—or emotionally challenging, at the very least. Sustainability is explicitly also about motivation. And motivation, we've found, is primarily affected by communication and accountability. So it seems to all come back to these.",[13,154,155],{},[134,156,157],{},"CULTURE OF RESPECT → COMMUNICATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY → AGILITY",[13,159,160],{},"And for us, the culture of respect gives us both of these. It's what allows us to effectively communicate amongst and between teams. Respect is also what leads to each team member feeling accountable for the end product. And respect leads to trust, with all of the benefits I mentioned earlier. And so mutual respect amongst our team members is what allows us to be agile, in the original spirit of the Agile manifesto. (In one author's humble opinion!)",[13,162,163],{},"The prescribed Agile frameworks are designed to be more flexible than the prevailing software development practices that came before them. What we're doing is arguably even more flexible. Lighter and looser. I say this while also acknowledging that our teams are fairly small as compared to a lot of organizations. The average tenure of an Axure employee is quite long, turnover is very low, and managers of teams have generally personally hired all of their reports. And we have about one product manager for every three developers. So we have lots of advantages that allow us to get away with being loose and informal.",[13,165,166],{},"We're well aware of the perils of growing our headcount; we've seen many different scenarios play out on our customers' teams. So some day it may be different, and then we'll have to adapt. But the culture of respect will continue to be a constant, as best as we can manage it.",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":170},"",2,[171],{"id":59,"depth":169,"text":60},[173,174],"User Stories","UX Trends","2016-11-16T00:00:00.000Z","Agility is context-dependent. By contrast, the various prescribed Agile and Agile-like frameworks—just as with any set of best-fit guidelines—are context-independent. Does Axure practice Agile software development? The short answer: yes and no. For the long answer, read on.","md",null,{"src":178},{},true,"/blog/agility-is-mutual-respect",{"src":184},"/images/2019/04/ybzg2shzddm.jpg",{"title":7,"description":176},"blog/agility-is-mutual-respect","RPtOzlJ7Wa0l0r9K0Ig2zz4T3R4sJ10uijJ_9k70X1w",{"id":189,"title":190,"author":8,"body":191,"categories":249,"date":250,"description":251,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":252,"meta":253,"navigation":181,"path":254,"previewImage":255,"seo":257,"stem":258,"tags":178,"__hash__":259},"blog/blog/developing-the-subscription-update-to-the-axure-customer-portal.md","Developing the Subscription Update to the Axure Customer Portal",{"type":10,"value":192,"toc":247},[193,201,204,213,216,219,226,229,232,235,238,241,244],[13,194,195,196,200],{},"I figured that the ",[20,197,199],{"href":198},"/c/blog/202-news-updates-axure-customer-portal-september-2016-edition.html","recent visual and UX design update to the Axure customer portal"," would be a good opportunity to take you behind the scenes at Axure to look at the life cycle of a similar project: our previous portal update, which went live this past April and coincided with the Axure RP 8 release. This particular update focused on adding tools for purchasing, renewing, canceling, and assigning subscription licenses of Axure RP.",[13,202,203],{},"We've been refining how we build software here at Axure since 2002, and by this point the process is pretty streamlined. But we don't adhere to any particular espoused philosophy of process management; we aren't a strict Scrum Agile shop, and we don't make use of a Kanban board. Our approach is informal by design, which makes it hard to encapsulate in a pithy five-point list or what have you. But what I can do instead is describe it by example.",[13,205,206],{},[16,207,208,209,212],{},"(This article is adapted from a portion of a talk I gave in September 2016 at UC San Diego, organized by the extremely nice people over at ",[20,210,25],{"href":22,"rel":211},[24],". I'll be sharing more from the talk, which was about Axure's software design and development methodology, here on the blog over the next couple of months.)",[13,214,215],{},"Rachel, one of our product managers, ran the subscription update project, and she worked with Kevin, one of our developers. Victor—our CEO and our head of product management—was also involved because he was responsible for the change from the business side. The idea was to make subscription licenses, which were new to Axure RP 8, manageable via the existing license management portal. We needed this change for its own sake, but we also needed it a little ahead of the Axure RP 8 release so that we could test activating Axure RP with subscription licenses.",[13,217,218],{},"The scope was limited for this update; we knew what we wanted to accomplish, and we also had a set of things we wanted to avoid. At the time, we were planning for a comprehensive visual refresh of both Axure Share and the customer portal. The plan was (and still is) to unify those two properties so that they shared the same design language. We didn't have the new design patterns in April, so Rachel was instead prototyping using the then-current Axure Share assets so that we could begin to bring the two properties together in anticipation of the later visual and UX refresh.",[13,220,221,222,225],{},"We tend to start the process of developing a new feature pretty informally. The first prototype won't be very \"deep\"—just two or three screens. Victor will give feedback and clarify. Rachel will find some conflicts as she's incorporating the requirements and will present some possible resolutions, and Victor will weigh in. There wasn't much competitive analysis on this particular project, but in this case there was a fair amount of ",[16,223,224],{},"comparative"," analysis, where we looked at how other software products of all kinds have implemented subscription mechanisms.",[13,227,228],{},"Development can begin as early as when the main scenarios have been addressed in the spec (i.e., the prototype). If the prototype gets to that point and the developer is still wrapping up another project, Rachel will continue to flesh out the spec, and it'll be more complete by the time development starts. Either way is fine.",[13,230,231],{},"In the case of this particular project, once Kevin had wrapped up his previous development work and had come on board, communication was a lot of chat, via Slack, and a lot of face-to-face. Kevin had the RP file to work from and would generally ask questions via Slack first, some detailed, intended to stay on chat, and some short, followed by: \"hey, can I come over?\" (Rachel's desk happens to be next to mine, so I can confirm that Kevin was coming over a lot for a couple of weeks there. Which was nice for me, because I like Kevin.)",[13,233,234],{},"Because they built it, Rachel and Kevin are now the resident experts on the set of features included in this portal update—which at Axure means they're the point people for any bugs that come up. They'll switch back to the portal project and prioritize it when a bug needs fixing. This can put them behind on current projects, which isn't ideal, but it's a concession that we make in order to preserve our culture of work and ultimately boost the quality of our final product.",[13,236,237],{},"If we were doing strict Scrum Agile development, the Scrum Master might get concerned about the distraction of a portal bug fix and potentially push for Kevin to return to his current project. And poor Kevin would have to stand up the next day and admit that he didn't get anything done on the current project because he was fixing the portal.",[13,239,240],{},"Kevin takes deadlines very seriously, which is great. But if he were made to stand up and account for time spent on live fixes every day, it could be a recipe for anxiety and sleepless nights. Now, you might argue that that's a personal issue on Kevin's part, but we've found that happy, relaxed developers write better code, and so we prioritize that over sticking to a daily or weekly schedule.",[13,242,243],{},"The imposition of Scrum Agile on a team is, let's face it, a drastic measure. It's a step to be taken when your team has demonstrated a clear, compelling need for it. The subject of what constitutes a good reason for implementing Scrum Agile is beyond the scope of this article, but for now we're happy to concede that good reasons do exist.",[13,245,246],{},"In situations where a strict process management framework is called for, to avoid implementing one is to doom your team to inefficiency. But to impose one for its own sake, absent a compelling reason, is just as misguided. Ultimately, we've decided that a formal Scrum Agile approach—or any other formal approach to managing our software development life cycle—is unnecessary for the way we work today.",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":248},[],[173,174],"2016-10-05T00:00:00.000Z","We've been refining how we build software here at Axure since 2002, and by this point, the process is pretty streamlined. But we don't adhere to any particular espoused philosophy of process management; we aren't a strict Scrum Agile shop, and we don't make use of a Kanban board. Our approach is informal by design, which makes it hard to encapsulate in a pithy five-point list or what have you. But what I can do instead is describe it by example.",{"src":178},{},"/blog/developing-the-subscription-update-to-the-axure-customer-portal",{"src":256},"/images/2016/11/axure-customer-portal-09-2016.jpg",{"title":190,"description":251},"blog/developing-the-subscription-update-to-the-axure-customer-portal","kiP7P1E8g21gsxIoVS1V1ld11lNxloaol2DLP-M46iA",{"id":261,"title":262,"author":8,"body":263,"categories":372,"date":376,"description":377,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":378,"meta":379,"navigation":181,"path":380,"previewImage":381,"seo":383,"stem":384,"tags":178,"__hash__":385},"blog/blog/catching-up-with-megan-miller-and-erik-flowers-of-practical-service-design.md","Catching Up with Megan Miller and Erik Flowers of Practical Service Design",{"type":10,"value":264,"toc":367},[265,278,299,305,308,311,314,318,321,326,329,338,342,345,348,351,355,364],[13,266,267,268,271,272,277],{},"When ",[134,269,270],{},"Megan Miller"," arrived in San Francisco in November of 2014 to attend Adaptive Path's annual ",[20,273,276],{"href":274,"rel":275},"http://service-experience-conf.com/",[24],"Service Experience Conference",", she came as a web designer in the midst of an existential quandary. As a member of Stanford University's in-house Web Services team, the focus of Megan's passion had recently begun to shift away from her visual and UX design duties and toward a holistic view of her clients' end-to-end experience. Her team's services were an important piece of that experience, to be sure, but there were other pieces: web hosting, ordering and billing services, video-conferencing services, and IT considerations such as workgroup administration and web authentication. Megan was increasingly drawn to the bigger-picture question of where the gaps might be in that end-to-end experience and whether principles from her UX design practice might be applicable toward bridging those gaps.",[13,279,280,281,284,285,292,293,298],{},"By the time she returned to the city one year later for The Service Experience Conference 2015, it was not just to attend but to deliver a presentation of her own. A lot had happened in the intervening year. She had been in the audience when ",[134,282,283],{},"Erik Flowers",", Principal Service Designer at Intuit, delivered a presentation at the 2014 conference. Inspired by his story of success in carving out a place for service design at a high-profile technology firm, Megan contacted him for advice. Their email exchange led to a series of in-person meetings, a weekly web-hangout working session, and ultimately to the launch of ",[20,286,289],{"href":287,"rel":288},"http://www.practicalservicedesign.com/",[24],[134,290,291],{},"Practical Service Design",", a central resource and \"home away from home\" for service designers both fledgling and experienced. The site launch coincided with a new title for Megan: Senior Service Designer. Service design had officially arrived at Stanford. (Check out ",[20,294,297],{"href":295,"rel":296},"http://www.practicalservicedesign.com/video-a-journey-to-service-design-service-experience-conference-2015",[24],"Megan's 2015 talk"," if you'd like to hear her inspiring story in her own words.)",[300,301,302],"blockquote",{},[13,303,304],{},"UX Design has matured. 10 years ago, having a UX team would have been novel. Now, it's a must. Companies are defined by UX and customer delight, because there are 20 other apps just like yours.",[13,306,307],{},"When we checked in with Megan to see what might have changed around the office since her change of position, we found her still experiencing the rush and challenge of the new. \"I came to this with 10 years of UX and digital design experience,\" she said. \"It's a new skillset—a very different toolkit. Your wireframes won't help you.\" (Instead, the discipline lends itself to certain other types of deliverables: the service ecosystem map, the end-to-end overview, the service blueprint. More on that below.)",[13,309,310],{},"Megan's service design projects so far have prominently included the \"contextual inquiry\" method—i.e., sitting with your users and watching them do the task you're interested in—and the results have been illuminating. A recent project studying campus-wide usage of document storage and collaboration services (e.g., Google Drive) was typical of her approach: \"I had them show me tasks: pains, gains, creative uses. I brought back emerging personas, top uses, top gains, top pains, preliminary recommendations. The idea is that the information collected will inform future strategies. It all went into a big report, and the research will stand up over the next year.\"",[13,312,313],{},"Depending on the project, the findings may or may not be immediately actionable—but that's perhaps to be expected while an organization's first-ever service designer builds a body of research. No immediate next steps were planned to follow on from that particular study; instead, the research will fit into and help clarify the larger picture of how Stanford's community can best benefit from their IT services. \"These collaboration services are not going away,\" she said.",[57,315,317],{"id":316},"why-now","Why Now?",[13,319,320],{},"Megan's trajectory from UX design to service design mirrors a broader trend. (The service-design-focused Service Experience Conference, which facilitated Megan's and Erik's partnership, was first held in 2013 and will move to a larger venue this fall.) \"Service design is only about 20 years old,\" she told us. \"The roots are in the services industry: hospitality and government to name a few. We've only seen it recently catching on in the West Coast.\"",[300,322,323],{},[13,324,325],{},"We've had people comment that they've worked in an area for five or six years but never truly saw the end-to-end of what happens before and after their part. That's the magic of service design and the service blueprint.",[13,327,328],{},"In her view, the rising profile of user experience design over the last decade has been an important prerequisite, giving customer-focused organizations a model for how to now think about and take advantage of service design. \"UX Design has matured. 10 years ago, having a UX team would have been novel. Now, it's a must. Companies are defined by UX and customer delight, because there are 20 other apps just like yours. We're riding a wave of design that is cresting. Everyone is getting the basics right.\"",[13,330,331,332,337],{},"This, more than anything else, may explain the trending popularity of service design: organizations by and large now \"get\" the value of UX design, have incorporated it into their processes, and are ready to take the next step on the path toward a comprehensively user-centric ideology. (For more on the challenges and opportunities of service design, ",[20,333,336],{"href":334,"rel":335},"https://www.service-design-network.org/community-knowledge/why-customer-experience-isnt-enough",[24],"check out this article by Erik and Megan, available over at Service Design Network",".)",[57,339,341],{"id":340},"the-service-blueprint","The Service Blueprint",[13,343,344],{},"We caught up with Erik Flowers via Slack chat to find out how he diagrams and documents his findings in his work at Intuit. \"We've utilized the service blueprint format heavily,\" he told us, \"modifying it into something sort of new that allows us to take these end-to-end experiences and really dive deep into each moment from the surface journey that you can see from the outside, to the deep core of underlying support processes and systems and people that make it happen. It's an analysis of all the intermixed pipes, wires, tunnels, chutes, ladders, and our internal actors that are supporting the experience above and trying to make it as functional and smooth for the customer as we can.\"",[13,346,347],{},"The service blueprint really shines when documenting the most complex of systems—the ones with the greatest potential for inefficiencies and oversights to creep in. Erik explained: \"For those scenarios that really add up in the end as a painful customer support case, we're able to address things much more collaborative and end-to-end. Then we can get to root cause and fix it upstream, so the logjam never happens in the first place. You can pull logs out of a river all you want, but it's better to actually take a step back and see why they're coming down at a rate that is causing the downstream jam.\"",[13,349,350],{},"\"We've had people comment that they've worked in an area for five or six years but never truly saw the end-to-end of what happens before and after their part. That's the magic of service design and the service blueprint. It gives you a high level view and at the same time a highly detailed view. And with that, you can finally look at the beginning and end of an experience, and everything in-between, and generate those easy tactical fixes you can just go do right away, and larger strategic insights that require a vision shift across silos that probably will need leadership to see that end-to-end and let them see how everything is impacting something else. There's really no way a single team or person can see that, it's just too big. But once you make it tangible and visible, you can take that high level, wide view, and generate insights from that without having to hold it in your brain all at once.\"",[57,352,354],{"id":353},"here-to-stay","Here to Stay",[13,356,357,358,363],{},"Is service design a flavor of the month? Juha Kronqvist, a researcher and lecturer at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland, defended the long-term value of the discipline in ",[20,359,362],{"href":360,"rel":361},"https://medium.com/human-to-human-stories/this-is-not-service-design-7dc5ad22811a",[24],"an article"," published on Medium last November: \"The ongoing change from an industrial society to a service economy is getting stronger and affects the design world as well. The share of services in GDP is rapidly growing and successful products increasingly resemble services (Iphone, Nest, Fitbit). Service design is created in response to this megatrend and it elevates the capabilities of designers to a strategic level. Designers are expected to understand how services operate, even if they only design products. Service design — developed during the past 30 years — is still new and not without growing pains, but interest in its utilisation is booming as tangible results start stacking up.\"",[13,365,366],{},"For Megan's part, she retains a healthy dose of self-deprecating skepticism even in the midst of her enthusiasm. \"Service design isn't the silver bullet,\" she told us. \"We'll hit the trough of disillusionment at some point. But we're really new here, so we don't want to limit the possibilities.\"",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":368},[369,370,371],{"id":316,"depth":169,"text":317},{"id":340,"depth":169,"text":341},{"id":353,"depth":169,"text":354},[283,373,270,291,374,375,174],"Intuit","service design","Stanford University","2016-08-31T00:00:00.000Z","\"UX Design has matured. 10 years ago, having a UX team would have been novel. Now, it's a must. Companies are defined by UX and customer delight because there are 20 other apps just like yours.\"",{"src":178},{},"/blog/catching-up-with-megan-miller-and-erik-flowers-of-practical-service-design",{"src":382},"/images/2016/12/erik_flowers_sticky_notes_web.jpg",{"title":262,"description":377},"blog/catching-up-with-megan-miller-and-erik-flowers-of-practical-service-design","9S0Wv8b7n77FWzsq58iVPWbk8PZMlzqIE__viPWx_Pk",{"id":387,"title":388,"author":8,"body":389,"categories":524,"date":527,"description":528,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":529,"meta":531,"navigation":181,"path":532,"previewImage":533,"seo":534,"stem":535,"tags":178,"__hash__":536},"blog/blog/creating-and-publishing-ui-style-guide-and-standards.md","Creating UI Standards / Style Guides with Elizabeth Benker",{"type":10,"value":390,"toc":515},[391,407,410,414,417,420,423,428,432,435,442,446,449,452,455,458,461,465,468,471,474,478,481,484,487,492,496,499,502,505,508,512],[13,392,267,393,398,399,402,403,406],{},[20,394,397],{"href":395,"rel":396},"http://www.zsassociates.com/",[24],"ZS Associates"," went through a company-wide rebranding in 2014, ",[134,400,401],{},"Elizabeth Benker","—at the time a Design Lead, and now the UX Manager for the firm's Javelin™ Product Suite—saw the opportunity for a systematic, standards-based approach to the design overhaul of the product portfolio. The result, after a six-month effort requiring a balance of focus between the UX team's standards work and its members' various primary job functions, was a comprehensive new set of design guidelines: the ",[134,404,405],{},"ZSUI Standards",".",[13,408,409],{},"In a postmortem phone conversation with Axure this spring, Elizabeth told us that Axure RP turned out to be integral to the process of developing the new framework and communicating it within the software development team. \"The project had been dragging on because we were stuck on the tool question. When we finally landed on Axure, we all said, 'Genius!' We were all fired up. We had everything we needed to get started.\"",[57,411,413],{"id":412},"the-project","The Project",[13,415,416],{},"The firm’s larger rebranding effort had provided Elizabeth and her colleagues in UX with a rare moment. \"All of a sudden, all of the software we build had to be updated at the same time. We wanted to seize the opportunity to develop a consistent look and feel and a single set of interaction patterns. Because there was so much excitement with the new brand, we had a lot of organizational momentum.\"",[13,418,419],{},"The goal was to unify ZS' Javelin™ products through a consistent user experience, starting with a unified user interface. The means to that end was conceived as a central repository where anyone—UX designers, product managers, front-end developers, and even consultants developing custom applications for clients—could go to learn about design standards, see and experience working examples, and download functional assets.",[13,421,422],{},"As the UX team began to gear up for the standards effort, the potential benefits of the project became even more apparent: the new framework could also serve as an onboarding tool for new team members. \"We were painfully aware that our lack of documented standards wasn't just resulting in a lack of alignment across teams, but also frustration among our own new people,\" said Elizabeth.",[300,424,425],{},[13,426,427],{},"We had a new person join the UX team in January—she was much more effective from day one. Her first week, she’s wireframing, and it looks like our stuff!",[57,429,431],{"id":430},"the-team","The Team",[13,433,434],{},"The project began with just three designers—Elizabeth, Shannon Burch, and Andrew Heber—a tight-knit group who had forged a common sensibility through sheer time spent shoulder-to-shoulder. \"The three of us had worked on a massive, complex project together. To support multiple people working on the same design, we'd quickly aligned on styles. We'd worked it out through many conversations. When we were no longer on that project, we brought the same standards back to our own products. And for a while, that worked.\"",[13,436,437,438,441],{},"But the ad-hoc approach to standards wasn't scalable. \"They were locked away in our heads,\" Elizabeth recalled. \"For the framework project, we needed more hands on deck from a UX perspective. The original three of us had all of these standards, discussions, agreements, but we hadn’t documented them. We just ",[16,439,440],{},"knew"," the standards—or we thought we did! But we weren’t as aligned as we thought we were. It was frustrating. A new designer would show me a screen and I'd say: these aren’t aligned with standards. They'd show someone else, and another opinion would emerge.\"",[57,443,445],{"id":444},"the-tools-question","The Tools Question",[13,447,448],{},"Perhaps the very method by which the UX team aligned could also be the platform for distributing the finished framework? They began to look for the right tool.",[13,450,451],{},"\"We met with our front-end developers. We asked: should we buy an off-the-shelf tool to create a style guide in a way that multiple people can access? A CMS, or maybe some kind of style guide app? But all of the tools to build style guides were not quite right for us. We knew we wanted an online repository that communicated and presented our standards.",[13,453,454],{},"\"Our designers are not developers. They’re designers. Not unicorns. We really, really wanted the designers to be able to create and update standards themselves. And we wanted those UI interactions to be demonstrated via working examples; we didn't want just pretty pictures of them.",[13,456,457],{},"\"With all of those criteria, we struck out. We even discussed building it from scratch through a vendor. For a while, we felt quite discouraged.\"",[13,459,460],{},"And then Andrew, a Senior UX Designer, said “Why don’t we just use Axure?”",[57,462,464],{"id":463},"results","Results",[13,466,467],{},"The ZSUI Standards project ultimately took the form of a microsite, built in Axure RP and published to Axure Share, along with a downloadable package of production-ready CSS built by their front-end developers. UX Designers use the Axure masters and libraries as a ready-made, drop-and-drag toolkit for creating on-brand, interactive wireframes. UX Developers leverage the CSS Framework when building new features.",[13,469,470],{},"Elizabeth told us that the results have been positive. \"The UX team has been using the new framework since the beginning of the year. The wireframes are on-brand right out of the gate. They’re able to learn the standards quickly. It’s really cut down on the time, both for wireframing and for onboarding new UX team members.",[13,472,473],{},"\"Now it’s so much easier. When we had a new person join the UX team in January, the contrast between onboarding her and the previous person was like night and day. She was much more effective from day one. Her first week, she’s wireframing, and it looks like our stuff! And visual QA time to ensure the finished product is polished and on-brand has also decreased because everyone is pulling from a shared collection of design and development assets.\"",[57,475,477],{"id":476},"ongoing","Ongoing",[13,479,480],{},"Axure RP's features geared toward collaboration and content reuse—team projects, discussions on Axure Share, masters, and custom-built widget libraries—have facilitated the upkeep and continual improvement of the ZSUI Standards.",[13,482,483],{},"\"Now we have a backlog. We release one new standard a week at this point. We started with the straightforward stuff: radio buttons, a fonts page, a colors page, error handling, success messages. Aligning the standards is no small feat. It’s a lot of passionate arguments and discussions.",[13,485,486],{},"\"But what’s so great is that we have time now for conversations about the deeper things. Now we’re really tackling: what should the filtering experience be like across our products? Things that are much more complex. Now that we've solved the lesser issues, it frees us to focus on the thornier problems.\"",[300,488,489],{},[13,490,491],{},"It empowers people—they can put things together themselves. They have more confidence that what they put together is high-quality and consistent.",[57,493,495],{"id":494},"next-steps","Next Steps",[13,497,498],{},"Elizabeth is excited about what the new framework means for the future of design collaboration across teams at ZS Associates. \"We have a test case happening right now. A team that is not a product team is using the assets. They’re building something and it looks exactly like one of our products. It’s pretty cool.\"",[13,500,501],{},"Pavneet Kaur, a developer based in ZS' Pune, India office, shares the sentiment. \"We're building a new product with a very intense timeline. Initially I was a bit hesitant to use the ZSUI Framework. I thought it would be a difficult and time-consuming activity for me to understand and use the library they made. But Mikhail (Vazhenin, a front-end developer involved in the standards effort) made it look like a piece of cake. To summarize, I would say: it’s easy to make things look hard, but hard to make things looks easy. ZSUI makes everything easily beautiful and consistent.\"",[13,503,504],{},"\"It empowers people,\" said Elizabeth. \"They can put things together themselves. They have more confidence that what they put together is high-quality and consistent.\"",[506,507],"hr",{},[57,509,511],{"id":510},"about-elizabeth-benker","About Elizabeth Benker",[13,513,514],{},"Elizabeth leads User Experience strategy, research, and design for ZS’ Javelin™ suite, a set of software applications that maximize sales force performance. In addition to her product role, she also applies UX methods to consulting engagements focused on solving complex business problems for global firms. In her career as a UX professional, Elizabeth has worked with a wide range of Fortune 100 clients. She has also worked on multiple in-house teams and taught user-centered design at the university level. This varied experience has shown her that good UX is truly a strategic differentiator. It is this belief that fuels her passion for UX, whether she’s working to improve a CEO-level executive dashboard or a consumer-facing cruise-booking engine.",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":516},[517,518,519,520,521,522,523],{"id":412,"depth":169,"text":413},{"id":430,"depth":169,"text":431},{"id":444,"depth":169,"text":445},{"id":463,"depth":169,"text":464},{"id":476,"depth":169,"text":477},{"id":494,"depth":169,"text":495},{"id":510,"depth":169,"text":511},[401,525,526,173,397],"style guide","ui standards","2016-07-26T00:00:00.000Z","When ZS Associates went through a company-wide rebranding in 2014, Elizabeth Benker—at the time a Design Lead, and now the UX Manager for the firm's Javelin™ Product Suite—saw the opportunity for a systematic, standards-based approach to the design overhaul of the product portfolio. ",{"src":530},"/images/2019/04/_4815u_acqq.jpg",{},"/blog/creating-and-publishing-ui-style-guide-and-standards",{"src":530},{"title":388,"description":528},"blog/creating-and-publishing-ui-style-guide-and-standards","fChE3utqYyS43ehuPIffYYd0uwKty-i2UmP1UV6GMws",{"id":538,"title":539,"author":8,"body":540,"categories":684,"date":685,"description":686,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":687,"meta":689,"navigation":181,"path":690,"previewImage":691,"seo":692,"stem":693,"tags":178,"__hash__":694},"blog/blog/designing-an-erp-from-scratch-with-ken-randall.md","Designing an ERP from Scratch with Ken Randall",{"type":10,"value":541,"toc":674},[542,567,569,572,576,579,581,584,588,591,594,598,601,604,607,611,614,617,622,625,628,631,634,638,644,650,656,662,665,667,671],[13,543,544,545,548,549,554,555,560,561,566],{},"There comes a time in the life of a young and successful manufacturing firm when disconnected homegrown systems and spreadsheets aren't enough to keep up with the volume of demand. That's when people like ",[134,546,547],{},"Ken Randall"," come into the picture. A business analyst, Ken helps companies create ways to streamline the way they do business and make sure their high-quality products are delivered on time—every time. A couple of years ago, Ken was called in to do just that for ",[20,550,553],{"href":551,"rel":552},"http://www.element-designs.com/",[24],"Element Designs",", a manufacturer of custom cabinetry based in Charlotte, N.C. He and his team's solution was to customize and implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from the ground up. The system he envisioned pulled together many different parts of the company, from handling tailored customer orders to managing raw material inventory levels to manufacturing to shipping. For a small company like Element Designs, this was a daunting project. Here's how Ken and his team at ",[20,556,559],{"href":557,"rel":558},"http://flyingbridge.net/",[24],"Flying Bridge Technologies",", along with partner ",[20,562,565],{"href":563,"rel":564},"http://ifensys.com/",[24],"iFensys",", did it.",[57,568,413],{"id":412},[13,570,571],{},"Element Designs makes high-end custom cabinetry. Their products are made to order from highly precise specifications provided by architects and builders. The company was facing year-over-year growth but there was no way their manual processes could handle the volume and maintain their attention to quality details. From handling customer and manufacturing orders to managing raw materials inventory levels to shipping, it was clear the company needed to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.",[57,573,575],{"id":574},"the-challenge","The Challenge",[13,577,578],{},"This ERP implementation was an extremely large undertaking for a small and relatively young company. They had committed a good deal of their limited resources—both dollars and time—into the success of this project. So the pressure was on to get this right the first time. Failure was not an option for this company.",[57,580,431],{"id":430},[13,582,583],{},"Because this project was so critical to the company, we had a team of 14 people. That included the company's entire top leadership team of six executives, along with four key department heads. We also had a lead consultant, a process engineer, a technical architect lead, and myself as the senior business analyst. I was involved from the beginning, helping to identify the business case and developing the initial needs assessment. There were other people who floated into the project as needed, but they were not involved in the design, modeling, mapping, decision processes. That said, 14 people on the same page was no small feat, which meant that we needed a tool that would help communicate all the complexity of an ERP project. We chose Axure because it let us communicate with everyone in the company, and it was a tool that we could use throughout the project lifecycle.",[57,585,587],{"id":586},"the-kickoff","The Kickoff",[13,589,590],{},"Once we got buy-in from the company's leadership, we started the project with a workshop consisting of six clear-the-decks days, spread over two weeks, to get a clear picture of the current state of the company's way of providing products. We started by taking apart the business processes and documenting them in Axure. We had configured a number of templates and had organized the page hierarchy for the various processes and sub-processes to use for this workshop.",[13,592,593],{},"Moving from page to page and creating links on the fly in Axure, we were able to model in real time, at the pace of the workshop discussion. So there was no need to go back at the end of the working sessions and try to capture what was said, because we already had it captured during the sessions. At the end of the day, we just published the working models to Axure Share. As everyone already had the project link bookmarked in their browsers, it was a simple matter of refreshing the page to see the latest process models.",[57,595,597],{"id":596},"improving-the-flow","Improving the Flow",[13,599,600],{},"Process flows are the stock and trade of business analysts. We use them to define how something gets done and communicate that with practically everyone on the team—executives, business users, process engineers, tech leads, developers, QA testers, implementation teams and operations, to name a few. We also use business requirements documents to clarify the mission (the why), specifications (the what) and wireframes (the how). In the past, those elements were presented in separate documents, often in different formats—spreadsheets, illustrations, text, slides and so on. This made cross referencing information a big challenge, and created situations where documents sometimes had contradictory information.",[13,602,603],{},"For this project, we decided to produce a single file in Axure that would convey the information normally contained in many of these deliverables. Our document had process models, often separated into functional flows via \"swim lanes,\" systems information, and high-fidelity screens that with entry forms. The file also contained a functional prototype of a new online tool that customers could use to configure their custom cabinetry to exact specifications.",[13,605,606],{},"Business teams can see at a glance the interaction of systems and process. Along the process, they can drill down by clicking through to see more in-depth information, such as the screens and forms, user personas, the relevant business rules and so on. Or they can stay on a high level to get the big picture. Either way, stakeholders don't need to hunt down another document to get the information they need.",[57,608,610],{"id":609},"getting-everyone-on-the-same-page","Getting Everyone on the Same Page",[13,612,613],{},"As we laid out the end-to-end process in Axure, we found a number of instances where the left hand of the organization had a different mental picture of the business process than the right hand of the organization.",[13,615,616],{},"In this project, for example, this cropped up when we discovered through our flow analysis that some products had to be sent via expedited shipping to meet a deadline, even though it was the customer who had not approved the order in a timely manner. This was often because the up-front process was not being done in the right order. The Customer Service team set an expected ship date first and later asked the customer to approve the final order. More often than not, the customer approval was a day or two late in coming back, but the ship date was already established, and customer expectations were already set. For the Production Team, the only way to make up the time was to use express shipping - which added cost to the project and cut into the profit margin of the project.",[300,618,619],{},[13,620,621],{},"We find that putting the details of the business rules and UI on lower-level pages, allows us to keep the process flow diagram clean and readable. The details are abstracted into separate pages, but when published on Axure Share, are just a click away.",[13,623,624],{},"The Customer Service team did not know that this was happening until we walked through the end-to-end process. Once it was laid out for all to see, everyone came to understand the underlying complexity—a key first step in simplification. We were able to surface several instances like this where one process had unintended repercussions elsewhere.",[13,626,627],{},"To get everyone on the same page, we use the second major tool of the business analyst—business rules. Business rules are the logic and the rules of thumb that we use every day to make decisions in our jobs. Most of the time we don't even think about them; they are decisions based on our experience or gut feelings. Business rules automate that process with the goal of helping everyone be consistent and improving efficiency. As business analysts, our job often boils down to identifying the need for such rules, defining them, and then documenting them in a way that's simple enough way for non-technical team members can easily read and understand.",[13,629,630],{},"This is accomplished through flowcharts for the logic and decision, matrix tables to show conditions and options, and screenshots of the UI to show how users would see the information. In the past, that meant having to jockey multiple documents to see the entire picture—a word processor for a high-level summary and description, a spreadsheet to see the list of rules, a diagram depicting the flow, and image files to show screenshots. We were able to consolidate our documentation into a single file, using Axure. From a page presenting a process flow diagram, you could click an icon that lets you see the relevant business rules. Another click takes you to the UI mockup. We find that putting the details of the business rules and UI on lower-level pages, allows us to keep the process flow diagram clean and readable. The details are abstracted into separate pages, but when published on Axure Share, are just a click away.",[13,632,633],{},"In this particular instance, we designed better visibility into our process flows, which called for earlier and better information provided by the ERP solution to what was. This allowed the Customer Service Team to help set customer expectations before orders were committed, while allowing the Production Planning Team to have a more time to make priority changes in the production schedule.",[57,635,637],{"id":636},"takeaways","Takeaways",[13,639,640,643],{},[134,641,642],{},"Simple presentations are key for engaging executives in complex ERP projects."," Element Designs had never modeled its processes before, and they were frankly leery of the need for such an up-front step. A great experience was required to prove the time spent would be worth the effort. Having the text, data, diagrams, UI, and related information in Axure RP as a central repository for all requirements, we were able to streamline the process and simplify it greatly for our client.At first, the publication of the process and screen mockups was thought of as an internal capability, between the business analyst and the development team. We quickly learned that the ability to publish to the client for feedback and validation turned out to be a huge win - saving a tremendous amount of time. At the end of every session, we were able to instantly publish the session's work. And since the client already had the Axure Share URL bookmarked, all they needed to do was refresh the screen to see the changes.",[13,645,646,649],{},[134,647,648],{},"Having a single file allows us to collaborate in real time."," This saves us the need for us to gather as much information offline as we would have had to otherwise. As we collaborate, we're able to make the changes in the document right then and there.",[13,651,652,655],{},[134,653,654],{},"Business rules are key to communicating with developers."," If you take the time to write and document the rules properly, the logic you create during the process can be easily translated into a series of case statements and if-then statements in the ERP software code, making the job of the programmer much easier and faster.",[13,657,658,661],{},[134,659,660],{},"Specifications often can be reused as training documents."," We were able to create a final overview version of the process that was used to train the production team on what the process looked like from 30,000 feet. We had not planned to do this at the beginning of the project, so it was a good win-win reuse of the definition requirements.",[13,663,664],{},"In the end, having a single document capable of communicating relevant information to all stakeholders saved us a lot of time, and it helped to make sure everyone from the CEO to the production manager were aligned and, quite literally, on the same page.",[506,666],{},[57,668,670],{"id":669},"about-ken-randall","About Ken Randall",[13,672,673],{},"Ken Randall has over 25 years of experience developing enterprise business processes and technologies. Throughout his career, Ken has been called on multiple times to resolve crisis and turnaround situations, as well as lead strategic initiatives. His expertise has evolved from client/server-based solutions to n-tier collaborative web applications and he has worked with many of the major technologies deployed today. Ken is currently Vice President of Business Process and Workflow Strategy at Wells Fargo. Prior to joining Wells Fargo, he was Vice President of Business Development at Flying Bridge Technologies Inc.",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":675},[676,677,678,679,680,681,682,683],{"id":412,"depth":169,"text":413},{"id":574,"depth":169,"text":575},{"id":430,"depth":169,"text":431},{"id":586,"depth":169,"text":587},{"id":596,"depth":169,"text":597},{"id":609,"depth":169,"text":610},{"id":636,"depth":169,"text":637},{"id":669,"depth":169,"text":670},[559,565,547,173],"2016-06-14T00:00:00.000Z","There comes a time in the life of a young and successful manufacturing firm when disconnected homegrown systems and spreadsheets aren't enough to keep up with the volume of demand. That's when people like Ken Randall come into the picture. ",{"src":688},"/images/2019/04/5airb5f464a.jpg",{},"/blog/designing-an-erp-from-scratch-with-ken-randall",{"src":688},{"title":539,"description":686},"blog/designing-an-erp-from-scratch-with-ken-randall","KJAWifu8l1QOehG_YMHY4XjzREQd3Pzyk_ue6V-FFtc",{"id":696,"title":697,"author":8,"body":698,"categories":950,"date":954,"description":955,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":956,"meta":958,"navigation":181,"path":959,"previewImage":960,"seo":961,"stem":962,"tags":178,"__hash__":963},"blog/blog/creating-user-centered-solutions-with-sap-fiori.md","Sana Salam on Creating User-Centered Solutions with SAP Fiori",{"type":10,"value":699,"toc":934},[700,703,715,719,722,729,736,739,742,746,749,763,767,770,775,778,781,784,788,791,794,798,801,804,808,811,814,818,821,824,828,831,834,848,856,859,864,868,871,874,878,891,896,903,910,915,922,925,927,931],[13,701,702],{},"In Italian, the word \"fiori\" means \"flowers.\" Three years ago, that's not a word that would likely spring to mind when thinking about enterprise business applications. SAP, known for creating software that form the digital spine of some of the world's largest companies, recognized that. SAP's solution, launched in 2013, was Fiori—a suite of front-end business applications designed to be intuitive, modern and mobile-ready.",[13,704,705,710,711,714],{},[20,706,709],{"href":707,"rel":708},"http://www.sodalessolutions.com/",[24],"Sodales Solutions Inc.",", the first SAP partner to become a certified Fiori developer, created a method for tackling Fiori projects. Here, Sodales' Founder and President, ",[134,712,713],{},"Sana Salam",", outlines her company's methodology, which she and her team have refined over the course of completing 26 Fiori projects.",[57,716,718],{"id":717},"why-use-fiori","Why Use Fiori?",[13,720,721],{},"Simply put, SAP Fiori is the new user experience of SAP. It simplifies complex SAP products into intuitive self-service tasks, ultimately boosting process efficiency and user adoption. SAP created Fiori to solve two major user experience issues:",[13,723,724,725,728],{},"Traditional SAP transactions involved ",[134,726,727],{},"too many screens and tabs"," making them daunting and inefficient. SAP Fiori UX reduces the number of clicks by showing only role-specific information and actions on the screen. In some cases, users see about 70% of reduction in the number of clicks with Fiori apps.",[13,730,731,732,735],{},"Traditional SAP products are module based, where ",[134,733,734],{},"users are required to memorize transaction codes and program names"," to access and execute various tasks within a process. SAP Fiori UX can break down large processes into simple, discrete tasks and eliminating the need to summon transaction codes from memory.",[13,737,738],{},"In some cases, users see about 70% of reduction in the number of clicks with Fiori apps.",[13,740,741],{},"Because Fiori is responsive and device agnostic, many SAP customers also use Fiori apps as mobile apps, which opens up new avenues of business solutions that can be applied in more settings than before.",[57,743,745],{"id":744},"when-to-use-fiori","When to Use Fiori",[13,747,748],{},"In order to assess whether SAP Fiori is a good solution for our clients, we typically look to see if one or more of the following situations is true:",[65,750,751,754,757,760],{},[68,752,753],{},"Tasks are time sensitive and completed by users who are on the road. This could be a plant technician reporting an operational breakdown, for example.",[68,755,756],{},"Users' responsibilities are not tech oriented. This could be a sales team working with customers.",[68,758,759],{},"There are complex SAP transactions that need to be decomposed and simplified for better efficiency. A good example of this is the SAP purchase order creation process.",[68,761,762],{},"The project involves cross-platform processes and sources. Examples of this are recruitment, training and help desk processes.",[57,764,766],{"id":765},"applying-design-thinking-for-fiori-projects","Applying Design Thinking for Fiori Projects",[13,768,769],{},"At Sodales, we've completed 29 SAP Fiori UX projects (involving over 100 Fiori UX apps), out of which 11 are targeted for Fiori mobilization. Our design philosophy for Fiori apps is based on the Design Thinking framework—a creative problem-solving technique that brings a disciplined approach to innovation. This framework is especially suited for projects with little or no precedent to help inform an immediate or pre-built solution, but not so exotic as to be beyond the realm of customized Fiori implementations. We use various design thinking tools for managing the end-to-end application lifecycle starting from strategy, budgeting, roadmap, technical feasibility, user experience, requirements and testing.",[771,772,774],"h3",{"id":773},"step-1-360-research","Step 1: 360° Research",[13,776,777],{},"Goal: Get smart quickly with problem discovery.",[13,779,780],{},"How: During this phase, we schedule interviews and observation sessions with a carefully selected group of users; preferably from various disciplines. Research phase can be conducted over a span of a few days prior to the workshop, depending upon the availability of information/stakeholders. In some cases, research phase might just be about reading current state documents, analyzing existing studies or conducting phone interviews. Let's use an example of a customer service process. In this case, we would start off by interviewing and observing various roles/personas involved in the process such as sales agents, supervisors, finance executives and operations teams. These one-on-one interviews allow us to capture unbiased yet personalized feedback and touch points about the problem. We augment insights gleaned from interviews with observation sessions to further understand the unarticulated needs of users. For example, if a customer service agent has to walk to a printer during customer meetings, that interruption might have a negative impact on customer experience.",[13,782,783],{},"It can be tempting to skip this step and take our clients' presentation of their problems at face value and start designing a Fiori solution. But if we don't take the time in advance to dig deeper into the source of their issues, we might end up solving the wrong problem.",[771,785,787],{"id":786},"step-2-synthesis","Step 2: Synthesis",[13,789,790],{},"Goal: Understand a typical user.",[13,792,793],{},"How: During this phase, we spend about 15 to 30 minutes visually describing a typical target user by identifying personal details. In addition to age and gender, we also dive into their challenges, what they see or hear on day to day basis, how they do their work, and what their personal goals are. We strive to put ourselves in the shoes of the user. There are several design thinking tools available for this, such as personas, empathy maps and so on.",[771,795,797],{"id":796},"step-3-journey-mapping","Step 3: Journey Mapping",[13,799,800],{},"Goal: Map the persona's current experience. Identify critical problems and opportunities.",[13,802,803],{},"How: This step mirrors the intent and design of Fiori, which seeks to create experiences around tasks performed by specific roles, rather than a transaction-focused approach. Journey maps, paired with insights gained from personas, are a powerful way to start thinking about how you can structure your Fiori solution. In this step, we spend about an hour to map out of how our typical user goes through a certain process. We capture specific information about their emotional experience, stakeholders and systems. This allows us to capture the cognitive reasons of why and how users do certain things.",[771,805,807],{"id":806},"step-4-brainstorming","Step 4: Brainstorming",[13,809,810],{},"Goal: Rapidly generate ideas. Incorporate best ideas in low-fidelity prototypes.",[13,812,813],{},"How: Here, we divide into groups of four to seven people, with each group addressing a specific problem. The groups spend about 45 minutes in brainstorming possible solutions. When forming groups, we try to include people from a wide variety of backgrounds, roles, levels of experience and departments. In our experience, this forced diversity tends to yield more novel solutions than having homogenous groups. For one of our projects, when we paired sales agents with lowest results with sales agents who achieved highest results, we found that the best and wildest ideas came from \"lazy\" employees who quickly found the easiest shortcut for doing a task. It is generally a good idea to have a project team checkpoint at this stage (designers, IT and executives ) to ensure we are still on track.",[771,815,817],{"id":816},"step-5-storyboard","Step 5: Storyboard",[13,819,820],{},"Goal: Create a visual representation of future",[13,822,823],{},"How: This exercise takes about one hour. Each group incorporates the most feasible and promising ideas to create at least one sample end-to end scenario of future. One of the key success factors for this phase is to ensure that we pair at least one executive decision maker with each group. The decision makers act as a moderator to ensure users are not creating something that is not a high priority requirement. The decision makers also help the participants with common understanding of various terminologies. The storyboard use show-and-tell approach. It is important to generate a large quantity of hand-drawn storyboards using as many sample use cases as we can think of. This allows us to conduct hypothesis testing in the next step.",[771,825,827],{"id":826},"step-6-create-napkin-pitches-and-low-fidelity-prototypes","Step 6: Create \"Napkin Pitches\" and Low-Fidelity Prototypes",[13,829,830],{},"Goal: Test hypotheses using rapid prototyping and feedback",[13,832,833],{},"How: This exercise takes about three to four hours of collaborative, hands-on work where groups set out to create their napkin pitches. One of the primary goals of hypothesis testing is to assess the feasibility and viability of solutions. This cannot be done just by looking at things at high level. It involves testing the storyboards we've created in Step 5 for specific use cases with a variety of day-to-day situations. The hypothesis testing of a service ticket app, for example, might involve several potential scenarios, such as: 1) a technician receives a phone call from customer; 2) the technician is onsite for routine maintenance; or 3) customer service receives a request for return of damaged equipment. Can our solutions work in all three situations?",[13,835,836,837,842,843,406],{},"To answer those questions, it's important that our prototypes are created with enough detail to test out those scenarios. Such details would include all the required field labels, layouts, and key performance indicators that can enable users to think through the design variations. We use Axure to create detailed prototypes for Fiori, using a ",[20,838,841],{"href":839,"rel":840},"https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design-web/resources/downloads/",[24],"library of templates, icons, stencils and controls"," that SAP has ",[20,844,847],{"href":845,"rel":846},"http://scn.sap.com/people/kai.richter/blog/2015/06/08/prototyping-fiori-applications",[24],"built specifically for Axure",[13,849,850,851,855],{},"If you'd like to explore SAP Fiori stencils, we created a ",[20,852,854],{"href":853},"/c/blog/189-quick-start-guide-designing-sap-fiori-ux-apps.html","quick start guide"," to get you on your way.",[13,857,858],{},"The combination of pre-built Fiori stencils and Axure makes the effort of hypothesis testing negligible; we're able to build a working Fiori prototype in Axure in as little 5 minutes. Through this process of building and testing our prototypes, we gain further insights into the solutions' feasibility, giving us the confidence to take our innovation journey to the next step.",[300,860,861],{},[13,862,863],{},"The combination of pre-built Fiori stencils and Axure makes the effort of hypothesis testing negligible; we're able to build a working Fiori prototype in Axure in as little 5 minutes.",[771,865,867],{"id":866},"step-7-implementation","Step 7: Implementation",[13,869,870],{},"Goal: Set up development project",[13,872,873],{},"How: At this point, we're off to a great start. We can begin planning the development phase of our Fiori project. At this stage, we can create an initial set of requirements as a project scope, as well as the supporting assets for business case approval. We use Axure to extract the documentation and data flow directly from the prototypes we created in Step 6. This documentation is quite detailed and gives us a fair understanding of the possible number of screens, the types of interactions, the user flows for various tasks in Fiori and so on. The visual prototypes created with Axure are also great for engaging executives during business case or budget approval meetings. They give executives the comfort of knowing that we have done our homework, and they create excitement because they can be touched and felt on a smart device just like a real app.",[57,875,877],{"id":876},"the-upshot","The Upshot",[13,879,880,881,886,887,890],{},"As you've probably gathered by now, Fiori makes designing business applications much more compatible with design thinking methodologies. That's because Fiori encourages designers to move away from thinking about software features and instead focus on roles and tasks. In an ",[20,882,885],{"href":883,"rel":884},"http://scn.sap.com/community/crm/blog/2014/10/14/five-things-you-need-to-know-about-fiori-for-crm",[24],"article on the SAP Community Network",", ",[134,888,889],{},"John Burton"," pointed out that, \"All SAP Fiori apps follow a design principle known as 1-1-3 ('one, one, three'). This means each screen should be designed with a single user (or role) in mind, a single task that this user wants to accomplish, and a maximum of three levels of navigation to perform this task.\" In other words, Fiori's 1-1-3 rule encourages us to focus on one user, one task and three screens. Simplicity drives return on investment.",[300,892,893],{},[13,894,895],{},"Fiori's 1-1-3 rule encourages us to focus on one user, one task and three screens. Simplicity drives return on investment.",[13,897,898,899,902],{},"The approach we've developed further amplifies those returns by allowing us to technically and financially validate the innovation before it is built, making it particularly effective under budget constraints. It lets us evaluate which Fiori apps we should build first and how they can deliver the most value at lowest effort. And it does so with the help of direct user input. \"Design thinking has significantly transformed the way of requirements gathering for us,\" said ",[134,900,901],{},"Khemraj Sharma",", Global Business Intelligence Manager at Karl Storz, a maker of surgical instruments. \"It adds personal emotions, which were missing in traditional approaches. It allows users to be fully engaged, and they can express their idea more openly.\"",[13,904,905,906,909],{},"Many organizations use design thinking to solve problems. What sets our process apart, however, is speed. The bulk of this exercise, Steps 2-6, can be accomplished in a single day. ",[134,907,908],{},"Joe McLaughlin",", Vice President, Operations and Technology for AAA's Western & Central New York division, recently ran his team through this exercise and noted that the fast pace resulted in an \"energetic, collaborative, and efficient approach to identifying improvement opportunities in key business processes.\"",[300,911,912],{},[13,913,914],{},"What sets our process apart, however, is speed. The bulk of this exercise, Steps 2-6, can be accomplished in a single day.",[13,916,917,918,921],{},"Processes are well and good, but what about results? ",[134,919,920],{},"Datta Sapre",", an executive in IT Applications at SageNet, whose team also undertook this exercise, told us that the combination of \"design thinking and SAP Fiori apps have helped us simplify our business processes resulting in increased user adoption and lower processing times.\"",[13,923,924],{},"We hope you find this process useful in your quest to build intuitive, user-centric business apps with SAP Fiori.",[506,926],{},[57,928,930],{"id":929},"about-sana-salam","About Sana Salam",[13,932,933],{},"Sana Salam is the president and founder of Sodales Solutions Inc., an SAP-certified partner specialized in Enterprise Mobility, User Experience and Big Data solutions. Before starting Sodales, Sana worked as a turnaround project manager where she revived derailed IT projects. Sana's passion for helping enterprises simplify their business by humanizing technology led her to found Sodales. Her firm uses SAP technologies and user experience methods to solve business complexities with a design thinking framework. The Sodales team has won several design awards, including the SAP Mobile Apps Challenge for Microsoft Windows 8 and the SAP Google Apps Challenge. Sodales was the first SAP partner to certify a Fiori app. Sodales is driving innovations for SAP customers in the areas of SAP® smart business analytics, IoT apps and SAP® S/4HANA extension apps.",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":935},[936,937,938,948,949],{"id":717,"depth":169,"text":718},{"id":744,"depth":169,"text":745},{"id":765,"depth":169,"text":766,"children":939},[940,942,943,944,945,946,947],{"id":773,"depth":941,"text":774},3,{"id":786,"depth":941,"text":787},{"id":796,"depth":941,"text":797},{"id":806,"depth":941,"text":807},{"id":816,"depth":941,"text":817},{"id":826,"depth":941,"text":827},{"id":866,"depth":941,"text":867},{"id":876,"depth":169,"text":877},{"id":929,"depth":169,"text":930},[951,713,952,953,173],"Fiori","SAP","Sodales Solutions","2016-05-10T00:00:00.000Z","In Italian, the word 'fiori' means flower. Three years ago, that's not a word that would likely spring to mind when thinking about enterprise business applications. SAP, known for creating software that form the digital spine of some of the world's largest companies, recognized that.",{"src":957},"/images/2019/04/wc6mj0krzgw.jpg",{},"/blog/creating-user-centered-solutions-with-sap-fiori",{"src":957},{"title":697,"description":955},"blog/creating-user-centered-solutions-with-sap-fiori","LjBK63WWnrXGLJhrp7Jti1edgnQZabIiZCbW_IRjL8I",{"id":965,"title":966,"author":8,"body":967,"categories":1125,"date":954,"description":971,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":1127,"meta":1128,"navigation":181,"path":1129,"previewImage":1130,"seo":1132,"stem":1133,"tags":178,"__hash__":1134},"blog/blog/quick-start-guide-to-designing-sap-fiori-ux-apps.md","Quick Start Guide to Designing SAP Fiori UX Apps",{"type":10,"value":968,"toc":1123},[969,972,990,993,999,1005,1028,1034,1045,1052,1061,1067,1070,1073,1076,1110],[13,970,971],{},"You don’t need to be a Fiori expert to start designing your own Fiori UX Apps. Working with Fiori stencils and icons created for use in Axure RP, you can quickly start building by dragging and dropping screens, icons and functional elements onto the canvas in Axure RP.",[13,973,974,975,979,980,984,985,989],{},"To get started, ",[20,976,978],{"href":839,"rel":977},[24],"download"," the Fiori libraries, and ",[20,981,983],{"href":982},"/support/reference/widget-libraries","load them into Axure RP",". If you don’t have Axure RP, you can still ",[20,986,988],{"href":987},"/download","download a free-trial copy"," for 30 days for this exercise.",[13,991,992],{},"Now let’s dive in. For this exercise, we’ll design a simple travel expense approval app.",[13,994,995,998],{},[134,996,997],{},"Know your test data."," Before you start designing, have a basic idea of the data you will need for your app. For our expense app, this could be the expense type, the amount of the expense, the receipt (as an attachment), date and purpose. Advanced tip: If the stencils you use are built as Axure RP repeater widgets, you can even upload test data from an Excel spreadsheet if you like to make the exercise more realistic.",[13,1000,1001,1004],{},[134,1002,1003],{},"Create role specific prototypes."," Managers approving the expense, for example, will see a different screen than the employee submitting the expense. SAP recommends that Fiori designers focus on one user, one task, and three screens, also known as the 1-1-3 principle. Figure out exactly what the user needs to do to complete the task and how they will interact with your product. In this case, the user is the manager and the task is to approve the expense.",[13,1006,1007,1010,1011,1016,1017,1022,1023,406],{},[134,1008,1009],{},"Gather ideas."," If you’re looking for inspiration, start by exploring the design elements ",[20,1012,1015],{"href":1013,"rel":1014},"https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design/explore/",[24],"here",". You can also poke around the ",[20,1018,1021],{"href":1019,"rel":1020},"https://fioriappslibrary.hana.ondemand.com/sap/fix/externalViewer/",[24],"SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library",". The library contains information about dozens of out-of-the-box SAP Fiori Apps. Here’s one for ",[20,1024,1027],{"href":1025,"rel":1026},"https://fioriappslibrary.hana.ondemand.com/sap/fix/externalViewer/#/detail/Apps('F0584')",[24],"My Travel Expense",[13,1029,1030,1033],{},[134,1031,1032],{},"Fire up Axure RP and load the Fiori libraries you’ve downloaded."," You’ll notice that the stencils come in three sizes. Choose any one.",[65,1035,1036,1039,1042],{},[68,1037,1038],{},"Large (L) - for desktop screens",[68,1040,1041],{},"Medium (M) - for tablets with touch-friendly controls",[68,1043,1044],{},"Small (S) - for phones with touch controls",[13,1046,1047,1048,406],{},"Learn more about these sizes ",[20,1049,1015],{"href":1050,"rel":1051},"https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design/",[24],[13,1053,1054,1057,1058,406],{},[134,1055,1056],{},"Create a Master Detail App."," Selecting a stencil from the SAP stencil library on the left and dragging it out to the design area. One of the most commonly used stencils for this type of application is ",[134,1059,1060],{},"SplitScreen_Object",[13,1062,1063,1066],{},[134,1064,1065],{},"Customize the fields to match your test data set."," This is where you get to have fun playing with the interface and configuring your perfect app. For example, using the SplitScreen_Object stencil, you can rename the “Products” column on left to “Expense” and the right column as “Expense Detail.” Continue to refine the screen until it matches your data set. Violà! You’ve designed your first Fiori UX App.",[13,1068,1069],{},"Once you’ve designed your master detail app for one screen size and form factor, it’s easy to adapt those designs for other devices by using the same stencils in the other two sizes.",[13,1071,1072],{},"The advantage of using the Fiori stencils and icons in Axure RP is that they automatically comply with the SAP Fiori Guidelines, saving you the time of having to go through the 27-page checklist when you go through the SAP Fiori App certification phase. (You’ll still need to be careful when styling and customizing the stencils, however, to stay within the guidelines.) As a postscript, keep an eye out for SAP’s forthcoming update of Fiori, which SAP Partners say will feature additional stencils such as cards and overview pages.",[13,1074,1075],{},"Need more information? We’ve compiled a list of additional resources.",[65,1077,1078,1084,1090,1097,1103],{},[68,1079,1080],{},[20,1081,1083],{"href":1050,"rel":1082},[24],"SAP’s Introduction to Fiori",[68,1085,1086],{},[20,1087,1089],{"href":1019,"rel":1088},[24],"A library of pre-built SAP Fiori Apps",[68,1091,1092],{},[20,1093,1096],{"href":1094,"rel":1095},"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohCcbie75SM&feature=youtu.be",[24],"Video walk-through of the SAP library",[68,1098,1099],{},[20,1100,1102],{"href":1101},"/support/training/core/1-basics","Axure Core Tutorial",[68,1104,1105],{},[20,1106,1109],{"href":1107,"rel":1108},"http://scn.sap.com/community/best-built-applications/blog/2015/12/11/6-smart-ways-to-use-axure-in-fiori-projects",[24],"More ways to use Axure in designing Fiori UX Apps",[13,1111,1112],{},[16,1113,1114,1115,1117,1118,1122],{},"We'd like to thank ",[134,1116,713],{},", Chief Executive of ",[20,1119,1121],{"href":707,"rel":1120},[24],"Sodales Solutions Inc",". for helping us create this guide.",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":1124},[],[951,952,1126,173],"Tips and Tricks",{"src":178},{},"/blog/quick-start-guide-to-designing-sap-fiori-ux-apps",{"src":1131},"/images/2017/01/Designing-SAP-Fiori-.png",{"title":966,"description":971},"blog/quick-start-guide-to-designing-sap-fiori-ux-apps","P_DBjEd3Q5kgp4-aRxEx_icJAex45GVMqsTHUUsU5gs",{"id":1136,"title":1137,"author":8,"body":1138,"categories":1376,"date":1379,"description":1380,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":1381,"meta":1383,"navigation":181,"path":1384,"previewImage":1385,"seo":1386,"stem":1387,"tags":178,"__hash__":1388},"blog/blog/archie-miller-of-carmax-on-implementing-lean-ux-in-large-organizations.md","Archie Miller of CarMax on Implementing Lean UX in Large Organizations",{"type":10,"value":1139,"toc":1364},[1140,1144,1157,1161,1170,1173,1176,1180,1183,1200,1230,1233,1237,1240,1244,1247,1251,1270,1274,1277,1281,1284,1288,1291,1297,1303,1317,1323,1346,1355,1357,1361],[57,1141,1143],{"id":1142},"introduction","Introduction",[13,1145,1146,1147,1150,1151,1156],{},"In 2014, CarMax set off on a journey to bring in Lean UX design principles to its organization. The company, known for revolutionizing the used car buying process in the U.S., is now focused on redesigning its web and mobile apps to seamlessly integrate the digital and store experience for its customers. While Lean UX is often associated with small companies that already have lean organizational structures, there are distinct challenges when it comes to large companies. ",[134,1148,1149],{},"Archie Miller",", Team Manager of CarMax's ",[20,1152,1155],{"href":1153,"rel":1154},"http://jobs.carmaxdigital.com/",[24],"Interaction Design Group",", talks about some of those challenges, and how his team dealt with them, through the lens of a single project to validate the company's online process for scheduling a test drive. This article is based on Archie's presentation at the AxureWorld conference.",[57,1158,1160],{"id":1159},"the-big-picture","The Big Picture",[13,1162,1163,1164,1169],{},"With 16 million visits per month, ",[20,1165,1168],{"href":1166,"rel":1167},"http://www.carmax.com/",[24],"CarMax.com"," lets car buyers browse thousands of vehicles, put a seven-day hold on vehicles that catch their eye, transfer cars to their local CarMax store, and inquire about financing, among other things. CarMax is focused on evolving its online capabilities as consumers do more of their shopping and research through web and mobile apps. As part of this larger effort, my team needed to evaluate and validate which existing functionalities worked well, and which could be improved. We adopted a customer-centric approach for our digital storefronts.",[13,1171,1172],{},"CarMax already had disrupted the industry more than 20 years ago by turning a universally dreaded life-event, buying a used car, into one that's straightforward and simple. We've even designed ways to make the experience fun. When buyers are ready to take their cars home, our salespeople bring out the vehicle with a big bow and offer to take a picture of our customers with their new purchase; many share those photos with their friends on social media. We wanted to redesign CarMax's digital experience to reflect the company's customer-centric approach of simplicity, transparency and innovation. In addition, we needed to retool our site to stay ahead of the shift towards mobile and escalating consumer expectations for their online experiences.",[13,1174,1175],{},"To do this, CarMax reorganized their digital teams to operate more like a lean startup product organization, which included creating an Interaction Design team. This is about the time I joined CarMax. What attracted me was the company's dedication to change—even though it continues to be successful. A lot of companies wait until success eludes them; then it's too late.",[57,1177,1179],{"id":1178},"lean-ux-vs-enterprise","Lean UX vs. Enterprise",[13,1181,1182],{},"While CarMax's online and offline values are similar, the paths for each turned out to be very different. Success at the brick-and-mortar level required strict adherence to regimen. Similar to many large-scale retailers, our company used procedures precisely documented for all aspects of its operations. Fine-tuned over 25 years, these procedures ensured a uniformly high-quality customer service experience across our 155 stores and 22,000 associates nationwide.",[13,1184,1185,1186,1191,1192,1195,1196,1199],{},"My team had adopted a ",[20,1187,1190],{"href":1188,"rel":1189},"http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920021827.do",[24],"Lean UX approach laid out in the book"," by ",[134,1193,1194],{},"Jeff Gothelf"," and ",[134,1197,1198],{},"Josh Seiden",". This method is challenging to pull off in an enterprise for a few reasons:",[65,1201,1202,1209,1216,1223],{},[68,1203,1204,1205,1208],{},"Lean UX emphasizes ",[134,1206,1207],{},"skills over roles"," interacting within several small \"one or two pizza\" teams. Large companies are often more accustomed to larger teams with less flexible organizational structures.",[68,1210,1211,1212,1215],{},"Related to the preference for skills over roles, Lean UX calls for plenty of ",[134,1213,1214],{},"collaboration"," among team members and stakeholders to foster a shared understanding. In large organizations, documentation and project task dependencies can impact communication and create silos.",[68,1217,1218,1219,1222],{},"Designing lean means fast iterations and the ability to focus on the ",[134,1220,1221],{},"speed of learning"," thus mitigating risk earlier. Enterprises often place value on speed to market by focusing teams primarily on deliverables and output.",[68,1224,1225,1226,1229],{},"For large organizations, accountability is tracked through KPIs. In Lean UX, an outcome that delivers ",[134,1227,1228],{},"value for customers"," becomes a leading indicator of success—those outcomes then drive the desired business impact for the enterprise.",[13,1231,1232],{},"In the case of CarMax, we had support from leadership down, and this places us in a much better place than other large companies where teams try to sell Lean UX from the bottom up.",[57,1234,1236],{"id":1235},"the-lean-team","The Lean Team",[13,1238,1239],{},"Our core product team consists of a product manager, lead developer, and UX designer. Each of the three has a voice, and there is constant collaboration and dialogue within the core team. When there's a disagreement, the product manager acts as the tie-breaker.",[57,1241,1243],{"id":1242},"the-task","The Task",[13,1245,1246],{},"Among our core online offerings is the ability to schedule a test drive. Customers who selected the option are shown a pop-up module that asks them to select a time and date for their test drive and enter their name, phone number, email address, password, and zip code. If the customer is brand new to CarMax, the site walks them through a registration process. But if the email address they enter is already in CarMax's system, our site returns an error message, saying there is already an account associated with that email address and suggesting that the customer sign in. That means, for existing or return customers, the scheduling process is interrupted. They must back up, click a tiny \"Sign in\" link and re-enter their email, password and phone number. We wanted to validate this process and see if it could be improved.",[57,1248,1250],{"id":1249},"the-first-hypothesis","The First Hypothesis",[13,1252,1253,1254,1257,1258,1263,1264,1269],{},"Our first hypothesis was that if we removed the requirement to sign in or create an account, it would reduce friction for customers and make it easier to schedule test drives and increase increase leads to stores. To test this, we recreated the scheduling process in ",[20,1255,8],{"href":1256},"/",", using screengrabs and a handful of basic widgets such as text fields, drop menus and buttons to make a \"retrotype\" that mimicked our existing flow (as opposed to a prototype for products that don't yet exist). The retrotype differed from the real thing in one key aspect—it replaced the account sign-in requirement with a simple checkmark Captcha that we'd need in place to foil bots. We used ",[20,1259,1262],{"href":1260,"rel":1261},"https://ethn.io/",[24],"Ethnio"," to recruit online testers. We connected with our testers using a screen-sharing application and by phone and watched as they walked through our retrotype on ",[20,1265,1268],{"href":1266,"rel":1267},"https://share.axure.com/",[24],"Axure Share",". What we learned surprised us. Some of our testers expected to either create an account or sign in to their existing accounts. When there wasn't a prompt to do so, they questioned if they had done the scheduling correctly. Had it really gone through? Would CarMax recognize who had scheduled the test drive? Secondly, our testers universally hated the Captcha, even though it required far fewer steps than the sign-in process. In other words, our assumptions were wrong. The problem wasn't the requirement to sign in or create an account; it was the way existing customers were asked to do so. And that sent us back to the drawing board.",[57,1271,1273],{"id":1272},"the-second-hypothesis","The Second Hypothesis",[13,1275,1276],{},"We realized from our first round of testing that customers actually expected to associate their car purchasing activities with their accounts so they can also track which exact cars they've reserved, test drove and researched. This is especially important within a used car buying experience, because, unlike new vehicles, two cars of the same year, make and model can differ. So we returned to the existing flow and looked to see how that could be improved while preserving the sign-in and account creation process. As mentioned earlier, if a customer enters an email address that is already in CarMax's system, our site returns an error message, saying there is already an account associated with that email address and suggesting that the customer click a \"Sign in\" link, and re-enter their email, password and phone number. We adjusted the flow so that both the sign-in and account creation was more obviously integrated with the scheduling. In Axure, we were able to reuse the assets from the first round to quickly create a test prototype that incorporated this new flow.",[57,1278,1280],{"id":1279},"outcome","Outcome",[13,1282,1283],{},"In less than three days, we were able to validate sign-in / account creation within a core function of our website as having value to both for us as a business and for our customers. Our lean approach meant that we were able to accelerate our learning. The point was not to get done quickly and fail fast. It was to get done fast, so we could learn fast. This \"quick win\" demonstrated the value of running lean experiments that ultimately lead to design decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions. In this particular test, our goal was to rev up our learning velocity and deliver the right solution for generating leads for our stores. We learned that account creation and sign-in was not the issue as we hypothesized. It was all about setting the expectation that an account was needed.",[57,1285,1287],{"id":1286},"lessons-learned","Lessons Learned",[13,1289,1290],{},"Lean UX in a large organization is challenging, but possible. Our initiative had the fortune of having the support of company leadership, including our CEO. But on a day-to-day basis, we still need to prove out the model to everyone else at the company whose help we greatly rely on. This is especially challenging when parts of the existing culture, which has yielded so much success, encounters new Lean UX principles. The most common challenge for us is re-orienting expectations from output to outcome. In the past, we measured success by hitting a project deadline fast and under budget. Now we must to convince stakeholders to trust a new set of metrics. The velocity of learning should be more important than velocity to deliver—it's no good to deliver the wrong solution quickly. Of course, accelerated learning results in accelerated delivery, but what gets delivered may be different. From this and similar experiments, we learned the following:",[13,1292,1293,1296],{},[134,1294,1295],{},"Start small and prepare to compromise."," When you initiate Lean UX practices to an enterprise, you might encounter \"corporate antibodies.\" These antibodies sense change and attempt to normalize the new process based on the more familiar process. Sometimes, you have to accept a compromise, but that's part of the challenge—recognizing when Lean UX can help and when it can't. Rather than completely redesigning the test drive scheduling process from scratch, for example, we started small, with a minor adjustment, to demonstrate the value of quick learning.",[13,1298,1299,1302],{},[134,1300,1301],{},"Build teams from within."," In this exercise, our product manager was relatively new to Lean UX methods. This experiment initiated him into the process and won him over. He was able to see first-hand the value of thinking by doing.",[13,1304,1305,1308,1309,886,1314,1316],{},[134,1306,1307],{},"Create orbits of communication."," In a ",[20,1310,1313],{"href":1311,"rel":1312},"http://aycl.uie.com/virtual_seminars/lean_enterprise",[24],"webinar on Lean UX for Enterprise",[134,1315,1198],{},", co-author of \"Lean UX,\" advocates the use of an \"orbital system\" as a way to loop in participants in an enterprise without bogging down the core team. He suggests holding regular \"retrospectives\" for people that your project needs down the line to succeed—compliance, customer service, and so on. At CarMax, we do this through a monthly Open House where we invite colleagues to see what we've been doing and share what we've learned. We usually just print screen shots and tape them to our wall so we can point to them to tell our story. Then we talk about what's next. The visibility not only helps the team to externalize their thinking, it eases others into the process.",[13,1318,1319,1322],{},[134,1320,1321],{},"Prepare for obstacles."," Open houses also help us prepare for potential obstacles. It's held for stakeholders who don't live with the product team. That usually includes executives who tend to see everything through a lens focused on strategy. That perspective can result in \"grenades\" being tossed. But, armed with information from an open house, they begin to appreciate that we can move quickly—and minimize risk—with little more than tape, sticky notes, and Axure prototypes. And the immediate feedback lets us address issues early, before they become showstoppers.",[13,1324,1325,1328,1329,1333,1334,1337,1338,1341,1342,1345],{},[134,1326,1327],{},"Be transparent, but also teach."," Our Lean UX team creates many prototypes and documents, and we share them all using Axure's ",[20,1330,1332],{"href":1331},"/c/blog/146-new-axure-rp-8-team-projects-axure-share.html","Team Projects"," feature or through Axure Share. This creates a level of transparency that helps inform our colleagues about our process. The problem is that within many enterprises, documents tend to have disproportionate weight. Managers see a prototype, and they assume it's a product in development when, in fact, it's just an idea. Most prototypes in a Lean UX process are created to satisfy a learning goal. Understand that goal, and the prototype is better understood. We've started naming our prototypes so senior leaders can better understand what we're doing, but not get overly excited if it's not a real product. We try to use vocabulary that reflects what the prototype does. A ",[134,1335,1336],{},"Learning Prototype"," is for reaching a learning goal. A ",[134,1339,1340],{},"Vision Prototype"," externalizes an idea. A ",[134,1343,1344],{},"Spec Prototype"," has passed testing and is ready to be built. We don't want anyone to confuse those types. Part of our job as a Lean UX team within a larger enterprise is also to educate the people around us and be transparent so that our methodologies are more likely to become part of the organizational culture.",[13,1347,1348,1349,1354],{},"If you're a user experience designer and would like to be part of our team, please visit our ",[20,1350,1353],{"href":1351,"rel":1352},"http://jobs.carmax.com/career-development/home-office-careers",[24],"CarMax jobs page"," to learn more about our projects and browse our list of openings.",[506,1356],{},[57,1358,1360],{"id":1359},"about-archie-miller","About Archie Miller",[13,1362,1363],{},"With over 18 years of product design experience, Archie has worked with a host of internationally prominent clients such as American Express Co., General Electric Co., Owens Corning, and Wachovia Corp. (now Wells Fargo & Co.). Most recently, Archie has led UX for online product development for teams at Crutchfield Corp., and Snagajob Inc. He is currently the Team Manager for the Interaction Design Group at CarMax. Little known fact: Archie was on the development team that created Amtrak's first website in 1997.",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":1365},[1366,1367,1368,1369,1370,1371,1372,1373,1374,1375],{"id":1142,"depth":169,"text":1143},{"id":1159,"depth":169,"text":1160},{"id":1178,"depth":169,"text":1179},{"id":1235,"depth":169,"text":1236},{"id":1242,"depth":169,"text":1243},{"id":1249,"depth":169,"text":1250},{"id":1272,"depth":169,"text":1273},{"id":1279,"depth":169,"text":1280},{"id":1286,"depth":169,"text":1287},{"id":1359,"depth":169,"text":1360},[1149,1377,173,1378],"CarMax","ux","2016-01-26T00:00:00.000Z","In 2014, CarMax set off on a journey to bring in Lean UX design principles to its organization. The company, known for revolutionizing the used car buying process in the U.S., is now focused on redesigning its web and mobile apps to seamlessly integrate the digital and store experience for its customers. ",{"src":1382},"/images/2019/04/irnuea04kuy.jpg",{},"/blog/archie-miller-of-carmax-on-implementing-lean-ux-in-large-organizations",{"src":1382},{"title":1137,"description":1380},"blog/archie-miller-of-carmax-on-implementing-lean-ux-in-large-organizations","cmdaRFrSS81rMHi0s48l0K9rGUrOp46My1UPITlsaAo",{"id":1390,"title":1391,"author":8,"body":1392,"categories":1452,"date":1453,"description":1454,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":1455,"meta":1457,"navigation":181,"path":1458,"previewImage":1459,"seo":1460,"stem":1461,"tags":178,"__hash__":1462},"blog/blog/six-ways-to-use-axure-in-sap-fiori-projects.md","Six Ways to Use Axure in SAP Fiori Projects",{"type":10,"value":1393,"toc":1449},[1394,1398,1412,1415,1423,1432,1435,1437],[57,1395,1397],{"id":1396},"working-on-an-sap-fiori-project","Working on an SAP Fiori project?",[13,1399,1400,1402,1403,1406,1407,1411],{},[134,1401,713],{},", founder of Sodales Solutions, shared how her firm uses ",[20,1404,1405],{"href":1256},"Axure RP"," to design Fiori products for her enterprise clients in an article on the SAP Community Network. ",[20,1408,953],{"href":1409,"rel":1410},"http://www.sodalessolutions.com/about-us",[24]," is an SAP-Certified partner specializing in enterprise mobility, user experience and big data solutions.",[13,1413,1414],{},"Her team developed their Axure chops during a project to simplify the Business Intelligence reporting framework for a large manufacturing firm. As part of the design process, Sodales marshalled a team of 27 business users in one room, each paired with their business relationship manager, to test storyboards and prototype potential solutions in Axure. Within two hours, the group produced 37 adaptive prototypes that they used to present their ideas.",[13,1416,1417,1418,1422],{},"The exercise also yielded a few insights that Sana shared in a blog post, \"",[20,1419,1421],{"href":1107,"rel":1420},[24],"6 Smart Ways to Use Axure in Fiori Projects",".\" Among them is the idea of using Axure to co-create solution concepts, the technique described above.",[13,1424,1425,1426,1431],{},"SAP, which recommends Axure to design Fiori prototypes for testing, provides its partners with free ",[20,1427,1430],{"href":1428,"rel":1429},"https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design/resources/downloads/",[24],"libraries of Fiori icons and stencils"," for use in Axure.* Sana's team took advantage of these libraries, writing that with \"one simple step you can import the latest Fiori design stencils ... into Axure and create click-through prototypes using drag and drop templates.\"",[13,1433,1434],{},"You can read more about this and five other uses for Axure that Sana outlines in her article.",[506,1436],{},[13,1438,1439,1440,1443,1444,1448],{},"*For further reference, ",[134,1441,1442],{},"Kai Richter",", SAP's Vice President of Global Design Concepts, ",[20,1445,1447],{"href":845,"rel":1446},[24],"wrote about his company's experience using the Axure stencils"," to design their own Fiori applications.",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":1450},[1451],{"id":1396,"depth":169,"text":1397},[1126,173],"2016-01-05T00:00:00.000Z","Sana Salam, founder of Sodales Solutions, shared how her firm uses Axure RP to design Fiori products for her enterprise clients in an article on the SAP Community Network.",{"src":1456},"/images/2016/12/fromthefield-sanasalam.png",{},"/blog/six-ways-to-use-axure-in-sap-fiori-projects",{"src":1131},{"title":1391,"description":1454},"blog/six-ways-to-use-axure-in-sap-fiori-projects","DppBkYJpPZsV7hZllJzS7r8iF-f44b3DQtu183k0JKs",{"id":1464,"title":1465,"author":8,"body":1466,"categories":1641,"date":1642,"description":1643,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":1644,"meta":1645,"navigation":181,"path":1646,"previewImage":1647,"seo":1649,"stem":1650,"tags":178,"__hash__":1651},"blog/blog/how-customer-support-can-be-a-product-experience.md","How Customer Support Can Be a Product Experience",{"type":10,"value":1467,"toc":1634},[1468,1471,1480,1483,1487,1494,1497,1502,1505,1508,1512,1515,1518,1523,1526,1529,1532,1536,1539,1547,1555,1558,1561,1564,1573,1578,1581,1585,1588,1591,1594,1597,1600,1604,1610,1616,1622,1628],[13,1469,1470],{},"The term \"technical support\" tends to conjure images of cavernous call centers filled with rows of workers who recite responses as they try to \"close cases\" and meet daily quotas.",[13,1472,1473,1476,1477,1479],{},[134,1474,1475],{},"Kip Mitchell",", Axure's Support Manager, believes that there's another way - one that is good for customers, good for business, and good for support professionals. Since joining ",[20,1478,8],{"href":1256}," in 2012, Kip has renamed Axure's technical support to \"product support\" and has made it his mission to scale a high quality support service that functions as an extension of the product rather than a company cost center.",[13,1481,1482],{},"Kip isn't alone. Many businesses are beginning to re-evaluate their approach to customer service, partly out of a desire to explore alternatives and partly because they strive to differentiate themselves through service.",[57,1484,1486],{"id":1485},"support-as-the-start-of-a-relationship","Support as the Start of a Relationship",[13,1488,1489,1490,1493],{},"Before Kip joined Axure, it was the company's president and co-founder, ",[134,1491,1492],{},"Victor Hsu",", who managed support for 10 years, frequently diving in to answer questions himself. It wasn't until Victor met Kip that he felt he could entrust that responsibility to someone else.",[13,1495,1496],{},"\"Kip's vision was that support was part of the product,\" Victor explained. \"For him, it's an opportunity to start a two-way conversation with our customer, a way to extend their experience with our software. When you contact Kip's team, he will assume that it is the beginning of a relationship and not just a quick fix. He'll spend some time with you.\"",[300,1498,1499],{},[13,1500,1501],{},"When you contact Kip's team, he will assume that it is the beginning of a relationship and not just a quick fix. He'll spend some time with you.",[13,1503,1504],{},"Like any good relationship, a key component is understanding the other person and how they see the world. Kip trains his team to try to gauge each case along three dimensions -- the customer's level of expertise with the software, their job function, and what they're ultimately trying to accomplish. This helps them provide the appropriate amount of information based on the customer.",[13,1506,1507],{},"\"You don't want to be patronizing by starting from square one, but you also don't want to omit details that might be useful for them,\" he said. \"To calibrate the tone and present the right amount of information is a real art form. So we try to take some time to re-read their questions and really think about what would be most helpful to this particular person. We don't always get it right the first time. But when we do, our customers get exactly what they need in a single email response.\"",[57,1509,1511],{"id":1510},"support-as-consultancy","Support as Consultancy",[13,1513,1514],{},"Support is often seen as the equivalent of Fix-It Felix among those who encounter problems with their software. And while that does describe many of the cases that come to Axure, Kip encourages his team to think of them not as problems, but as opportunities to consult and provide training on using Axure RP more effectively.",[13,1516,1517],{},"\"The product and the support you get with our software make up the lion's share of our customers' experience with Axure,\" he said. \"We all take that responsibility very seriously.\"",[300,1519,1520],{},[13,1521,1522],{},"The product and the support you get with our software make up the lion's share of our customers' experience with Axure. We all take that responsibility very seriously.",[13,1524,1525],{},"Customers will often send their Axure RP files to the Product Support Team, describing the issues they're having with it and what they want it to do. It's not unusual for customers to get their files back with the changes they needed, along with step-by-step screenshots of how it was done and suggestions for other methods the same outcome could be achieved.",[13,1527,1528],{},"Kip admits that not all products benefit from this type of intense coaching and consultation. But he believes it's the right approach for Axure, given the value that customers say they get out of their interactions with his team.",[13,1530,1531],{},"\"People are often surprised at how much effort we spend to give them a personalized answer,\" Kip said. \"For us, it's hugely gratifying because we're working against a set of expectations people have about customer support. It's just really validating when we're able to show them how support is different here, because we truly believe in this model.\"",[57,1533,1535],{"id":1534},"creating-a-job-that-people-would-want-to-do","Creating a Job That People Would Want to Do",[13,1537,1538],{},"Providing this level of support takes a particular type of person. At first glance, the list of job qualifications might seem impossible. The ideal candidate is altruistic, compassionate and empathetic. In addition, they are technically adept, enjoy solving problems, and can write well. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they should really want to do the job.",[13,1540,1541,1542,406],{},"This is a tall order. But Kip has a few tactics to help him find the right people—and retain them over time. The first is to offer above industry average salaries. After a year at Axure, a support professional typically earns roughly in the 90th percentile of wages for customer service representatives, according to the latest available ",[20,1543,1546],{"href":1544,"rel":1545},"http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes434051.htm",[24],"figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor & Statistics",[13,1548,1549,1550,1554],{},"The second, and trickier, part of Kip's formula is creating a job that people would actually want to do, and not just for the paycheck. This starts by giving his crew the tools they need to answer any question that pops up about Axure RP. The basic ",[20,1551,1553],{"href":1552},"/c/blog/149-inside-axure-support-getting-know-adaptive-views.html","training program"," Kip designed takes two to three months to complete and involves a nonlinear learning path where trainees choose the subjects they want to tackle from a grid reminiscent of a bingo board. Topics run the gamut from license management to adaptive views.",[13,1556,1557],{},"Some companies operate \"tiered\" or specialized support. They escalate complex queries to more senior staff, or route cases by topic to specialists. While those models have advantages, Kip decided to go the other way so customers could have a more continuous experience. Kip designed the training so that everyone who makes it through the program is able to handle any query that comes through the door. Of course, that doesn't mean they don't have help. The entire company is available to the team when the need arises.",[13,1559,1560],{},"With Axure RP, this model makes sense because a single case can cross over multiple topics and features within the software. For Kip's team, the opportunity to learn across a wide spectrum adds an element of challenge to the job, preventing them from getting into a rut.",[13,1562,1563],{},"\"For the type of talent we're trying to attract, they will have brains that are going to want to be intellectually challenged and engaged across many different subjects,\" Kip said.",[13,1565,1566,1567,1572],{},"During Kip's three-year tenure, Axure's support team has had a 10% turnover for the entire period. By comparison, the industry averages 33% turnover a year, or roughly 99% over a three-year period, according to ",[20,1568,1571],{"href":1569,"rel":1570},"https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140518182546-3995896-why-do-your-call-center-agents-quit",[24],"David Filwood"," of TeleSoft Systems, citing the International Customer Management Institute.",[300,1574,1575],{},[13,1576,1577],{},"We're very much post-revenge-of-the-nerds here. We think it can be a highly rewarding job.",[13,1579,1580],{},"\"We're very much post-revenge-of-the-nerds here,\" Kip explains. \"We think it can be a highly rewarding job. We try to hire people who like what they do, and we give them the tools they need to be experts at their jobs. Our customers sense that. They give us praise, and that leads to more happiness and job satisfaction.\"",[57,1582,1584],{"id":1583},"scaling-and-accountability","Scaling and Accountability",[13,1586,1587],{},"This is where a sharp-eyed executive would ask two questions. How does accountability work when there are no metrics? And can a model like this scale?",[13,1589,1590],{},"Axure's support team functions on qualitative reviews. Managers regularly go over cases with the support team to discuss their solutions. In addition, Kip plans to introduce a rotating position where each member of the team takes a turn conducting peer reviews of case responses.",[13,1592,1593],{},"\"It's a form of self-QA for the team,\" Kip said, who got the idea from a tradition among developers of doing peer code reviews. \"And it's a good way to learn by getting exposure to a wide variety of different cases.\"",[13,1595,1596],{},"As for scale, Kip says it is a real concern for him.",[13,1598,1599],{},"\"To be honest, I don't know how this is going to scale to double or triple the size\", Kip said. \"What's important—and what personally gives me hope—is that everyone here is committed to treating Product Support as an essential part of the business as we grow. So, come back in a couple of years to see how we do it then. We might not be doing to it the same way, but for sure we'll be committed to having the same results.\"",[57,1601,1603],{"id":1602},"recap-a-formula-for-support","Recap: A Formula for Support",[13,1605,1606,1609],{},[134,1607,1608],{},"Hire people who really want to do the job."," To filter for people who enjoy answering questions and being helpful, Kip asks candidates to go through a problem solving exercise. Correct responses are good, but equally important is how the candidate approaches the problem.",[13,1611,1612,1615],{},[134,1613,1614],{},"Empower them to be expert problem solvers."," Turn them into a team of problem solvers and product consultants. Through extensive training, give support professionals the tools and knowledge to be experts in their jobs.",[13,1617,1618,1621],{},[134,1619,1620],{},"Create a positive feedback loop."," \"When we do a good job, our customers are really good about expressing their appreciation,\" Kip said. \"That leads to more happiness and job satisfaction, which leads to a desire to do even better.\"",[13,1623,1624,1627],{},[134,1625,1626],{},"See Support as part of the product experience."," If your organization recognizes that customer interactions with support are a key part of their overall experience with your products, support can get the investment needed to make those interactions count.",[13,1629,1630,1633],{},[134,1631,1632],{},"Offer fair pay and benefits."," In addition to above industry average salaries, support professionals at Axure also receive benefit packages that include health, dental and vision insurance, as well as matching 401(k). If they're an important part of the business, treat them like it.",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":1635},[1636,1637,1638,1639,1640],{"id":1485,"depth":169,"text":1486},{"id":1510,"depth":169,"text":1511},{"id":1534,"depth":169,"text":1535},{"id":1583,"depth":169,"text":1584},{"id":1602,"depth":169,"text":1603},[173,174],"2015-12-17T00:00:00.000Z","If your organization recognizes that customer interactions with support are a key part of their overall experience with your products, support can get the investment needed to make those interactions count.",{"src":178},{},"/blog/how-customer-support-can-be-a-product-experience",{"src":1648},"/images/2019/04/temp_support_contact@2x.jpg",{"title":1465,"description":1643},"blog/how-customer-support-can-be-a-product-experience","AyK5k6JBCi7Wy5yv6a-W9L9sE-SoSBMcosDL_-5yZco",{"id":1653,"title":1654,"author":8,"body":1655,"categories":1828,"date":1829,"description":1830,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":1831,"meta":1832,"navigation":181,"path":1833,"previewImage":1834,"seo":1836,"stem":1837,"tags":178,"__hash__":1838},"blog/blog/axureworld-automated-mobile-menus-ux-map-mobile-prototyping.md","AxureWorld, Automated Mobile Menus, UX Map & Mobile Prototyping",{"type":10,"value":1656,"toc":1821},[1657,1660,1664,1684,1710,1714,1739,1742,1746,1755,1769,1773,1786,1794,1798],[13,1658,1659],{},"This fall, the Axure community has created a number of resources for fellow UX practitioners. The following are a few of the best.",[57,1661,1663],{"id":1662},"axureworld-2015-lean-ux-widgets-in-the-sky-and-collaboration-in-axure-rp-8","AxureWorld 2015: Lean UX, Widgets in the Sky, and Collaboration in Axure RP 8",[13,1665,1666,1667,1670,1671,1673,1674,1677,1678,1683],{},"If you missed this year's AxureWorld Event on Nov. 20, not to worry. ",[134,1668,1669],{},"Ezra Schwartz",", AxureWorld's founder and organizer, has published videos of the presentations on the conference site. The first, \"Axure for Lean UX Enterprise\" from ",[134,1672,1149],{}," of CarMax, covers how Lean UX principles are applied within a large corporation and illustrated with details from a sample project. In the second presentation, \"The Great Widget in the Sky,\" ",[134,1675,1676],{},"Ritch Macefield"," demonstrates how he uses Axure to create heuristic evaluations of existing applications. The talk is an elaboration of Ritch's popular 2014 article in UX Matters entitled \"",[20,1679,1682],{"href":1680,"rel":1681},"http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2014/06/an-overview-of-expert-heuristic-evaluations.php",[24],"An Overview of Expert Heuristic Evaluations",".\"",[13,1685,1686,1687,1690,1691,1695,1696,886,1700,1704,1705,1709],{},"The third video is an overview of the collaboration features in Axure RP 8, presented by Axure's Associate Product Manager ",[134,1688,1689],{},"Rachel Brown",". RP 8, ",[20,1692,1694],{"href":1693},"/c/blog/154-axure-rp-8-beta-now-available.html","currently in Beta",", contains a number of additions designed to make things easier for teams to work together, including ",[20,1697,1699],{"href":1698},"/c/blog/167-learn-axure-rp-8-beta-team-projects-axure-share.html","Team Projects on Axure Share",[20,1701,1703],{"href":1702},"/c/blog/166-learn-axure-rp-8-beta-print-guides-configurations.html","new print specifications",", and easier ways to ",[20,1706,1708],{"href":1707},"/c/blog/157-learn-axure-rp-8-beta-widget-styles.html","manage styles",", among other things.",[57,1711,1713],{"id":1712},"delicious-mobile-menus-made-easy","Delicious Mobile Menus Made Easy",[13,1715,1716,1717,1720,1721,1726,1727,1732,1733,1738],{},"Some stakeholders aren't comfortable with seeing just one sample menu of a mobile app—they want to see all of the permutations. For some apps, that could mean manually generating a dozen or so menu states and hand-linking each according to a sitemap hierarchy, a laborious process. ",[134,1718,1719],{},"Montgomery Webster",", a user experience technologist at ",[20,1722,1725],{"href":1723,"rel":1724},"http://creative-jar.com/",[24],"Creative Jar"," in the U.K., figured out a way to automate this task in Axure RP. His template, which he shares as a free download on the ",[20,1728,1731],{"href":1729,"rel":1730},"http://creative-jar.com/blog/experience-design-blog/automated-mobile-menus-in-axure/",[24],"Creative Jar blog",", lets you cut and paste the page names from a spreadsheet into an ",[20,1734,1737],{"href":1735,"rel":1736},"https://docs.axure.com/axure-rp/reference/repeaters/",[24],"Axure repeater"," that automatically puts the tabs into the correct hierarchy.",[13,1740,1741],{},"Montgomery acknowledges that it's not always necessary to take this extra step in a Lean UX process, but \"some clients just want it all. They understand that the additional work will take more time and budget. However, their internal workflow may require a fully-realised prototype. This is especially important when they have internal or off-shore development teams. I call this approach 'Fatty Tuna UX', after the expensive sushi ingredient.\"",[57,1743,1745],{"id":1744},"online-course-mobile-app-prototyping","Online Course: Mobile App Prototyping",[13,1747,1748,1751,1752,1754],{},[134,1749,1750],{},"Ronnie Peters",", the CEO of 360 Design in New York, has created a 45-minute online course on how to prototype a mobile app using ",[20,1753,1405],{"href":1256}," and other tools. The course quickly covers a lot of ground—from concept to delivery of a working prototype on an iPhone 6. It's a fast clip, to be sure, and some of the technical steps are mentioned only in passing. If you basic familiarity with the tools he uses, you're in good shape. If not, you may want to do a little side research to keep up with the course and build alongside him.",[13,1756,1757,1758,1763,1764],{},"It's an excellent overview of the mobile prototyping process, and one that comes from a seasoned UX practitioner. Peters' firm, ",[20,1759,1762],{"href":1760,"rel":1761},"http://360design.com/",[24],"360 Design",", has done work for American Express, the New York Times, Seamless, Reader's Digest and others. His class is part of Skillshare's Premium offering, which means you'd need to pay for access ($10 a month for access to their full catalog). You can ",[20,1765,1768],{"href":1766,"rel":1767},"https://www.skillshare.com/classes/design/Mobile-Experience-Design-Simple-Tools-to-Rapidly-Prototype-Your-App-Idea/478177274",[24],"read the course description here.",[57,1770,1772],{"id":1771},"documenting-your-design-journey-with-a-ux-map","Documenting Your Design Journey with a UX Map",[13,1774,1775,1776,1779,1780,1785],{},"Prototypes are great at communicating design choices, but they still need to be supported with more information—often in the form of functional specifications or user flows. ",[134,1777,1778],{},"Luca Benazzi",", a UX consultant and Axure trainer in Berlin, created UX Map, a widget library designers can use to integrate that information directly into their prototypes. Luca works on the assumption that documentation presented in context with the prototype leads to faster and more accurate communication than if they were in a separate document that's \"difficult to find and never up to date,\" Benazzi ",[20,1781,1784],{"href":1782,"rel":1783},"https://medium.com/@lucabenazzi/an-axure-widget-library-for-user-interactions-30e61fa4e657#.26pcf5wbl",[24],"wrote in a post"," explaining his approach in developing the UX Map. \"Documentation should be interconnected. The Axure prototype becomes a central place for all UX documentation.\"",[13,1787,1788,1793],{},[20,1789,1792],{"href":1790,"rel":1791},"http://www.ux-map.com/",[24],"Benazzi sells the UX Map for $19",", which comes with detailed instructions and two video tutorials.",[57,1795,1797],{"id":1796},"new-axure-meetup-groups-new-york-and-helsinki","New Axure Meetup Groups: New York and Helsinki",[13,1799,1800,1801,1806,1807,1810,1811,1816,1817,1820],{},"Axure aficionados in New York and Helsinki now have official Meetups where they can network and exchange ideas. The two cities join Chicago, San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, Richmond, Hamburg, Berlin and Manila, bringing the total number of Axure Meetup groups to 11. The ",[20,1802,1805],{"href":1803,"rel":1804},"http://www.meetup.com/Axure-Meetup-NYC/",[24],"New York group"," is organized by ",[134,1808,1809],{},"David Mahmarian",", formerly of Sapient Nitro and now a graduate student at the School of Visual Arts. The ",[20,1812,1815],{"href":1813,"rel":1814},"http://www.meetup.com/helsinkiaxuremeetup/",[24],"Helsinki Meetup group"," is helmed by ",[134,1818,1819],{},"Kwame Afreh",", a UI Designer at Webropol. Welcome New York and Helsinki!",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":1822},[1823,1824,1825,1826,1827],{"id":1662,"depth":169,"text":1663},{"id":1712,"depth":169,"text":1713},{"id":1744,"depth":169,"text":1745},{"id":1771,"depth":169,"text":1772},{"id":1796,"depth":169,"text":1797},[1126,173],"2015-12-16T00:00:00.000Z","If you missed this year's AxureWorld Event on Nov. 20, not to worry. Ezra Schwartz, AxureWorld's founder and organizer, has published videos of the presentations on the conference site.",{"src":178},{},"/blog/axureworld-automated-mobile-menus-ux-map-mobile-prototyping",{"src":1835},"/images/2019/04/conference@1x.png",{"title":1654,"description":1830},"blog/axureworld-automated-mobile-menus-ux-map-mobile-prototyping","3_DuOmp4DQ8UPmYqd1ZdgXD_QUD03fNLaF18PxObIck",{"id":1840,"title":1841,"author":8,"body":1842,"categories":2012,"date":2013,"description":2014,"extension":177,"featuredImage":178,"mainImage":2015,"meta":2017,"navigation":181,"path":2018,"previewImage":2019,"seo":2020,"stem":2021,"tags":178,"__hash__":2022},"blog/blog/john-henry-krahenbuhl-on-collaborating-with-a-distributed-team.md","John Henry Krahenbuhl on Collaborating with a Distributed Team",{"type":10,"value":1843,"toc":2000},[1844,1847,1859,1862,1864,1867,1870,1872,1875,1879,1882,1887,1891,1901,1905,1908,1913,1917,1920,1923,1927,1936,1938,1941,1946,1949,1953,1959,1965,1971,1973,1977,1992],[13,1845,1846],{},"Agency work requires fast response, flexibility in adapting to a range of requirements from diverse clients, and the ability to work fluidly with remote team members.",[13,1848,1849,1852,1853,1858],{},[134,1850,1851],{},"John Henry Krahenbuhl",", Lead User Experience Designer at ",[20,1854,1857],{"href":1855,"rel":1856},"http://www.epsilon.com/",[24],"Epsilon"," and author of several books on prototyping, walks us through a recent client project that used interactive prototypes to quickly gather consensus around a design challenge--how to satisfy multiple client stakeholder interests on a single page.",[13,1860,1861],{},"His solution streamlined what could have taken several client meetings to obtain approval into one. This article outlines how he did it.",[57,1863,413],{"id":412},[13,1865,1866],{},"This was a microsite for a product launch. There were several challenges in this project. The first was to incorporate the interests of multiple client stakeholders—all on a single page. Secondly, we needed to get consensus among the members of our own cross-functional team at the agency. Finally, we needed to do this quickly in a distributed work environment.",[13,1868,1869],{},"Some clients want extremely annotated wireframes or deliverables that map precisely with the requirements. Others want grayscale wireframes or a simple prototype with streamlined annotations. There's also a range of fidelity required by our clients. Some clients want pixel perfect designs across all platforms in complete compliance with their style guides. Some want all the consumer journeys and flows mapped out. Others are okay with sketchy wireframes and having us fill in only the new aspects of the flow. In this case, our client needed low to medium fidelity assets, along with documentation. The wireframes could be grayscale, and 90% pixel accuracy was sufficient.",[57,1871,431],{"id":430},[13,1873,1874],{},"The core team consisted of about five people, with several more who floated in and out when needed. We had a visual designer, copywriters and developers. I was the UX person. We're a global agency, so our teams are literally all over the map. Our client base is also global. We need to be fast, efficient and flexible. Every project has different requirements, different team compositions, different workflows and different client expectations. This is common for agencies, where projects can vary quite a bit. Having design tools that can adapt with your projects is key.",[57,1876,1878],{"id":1877},"the-first-challenge","The First Challenge",[13,1880,1881],{},"Right out of the gate, we knew we needed to address multiple stakeholder interests. Our client had a main product that they were launching, but our design also needed to incorporate products of other key stakeholders within the organization whose buy-in our client needed. All those other products had to be well represented somehow in our deliverables. To me, the solution was the image carousel. But carousels are a touchy topic among designers -- marketers love them, but many in the UX community hate them. Inside organizations, you often have many folks fighting for space on the page. You find ways to make peace. That's the real world.",[300,1883,1884],{},[13,1885,1886],{},"Inside organizations, you often have many folks fighting for space on the page. You need to find ways to make peace. That's the real world.",[57,1888,1890],{"id":1889},"more-real-world-constraints","More \"Real World\" Constraints",[13,1892,1893,1894,1897,1898,1900],{},"About 95% of our work is done remotely. We solve problems for clients with a distributed staff of widespread team members. And with each project, the team composition is different. I need to be able to share ideas quickly with anyone I happen to be working with, wherever they are located. Face-to-face meetings are rare. Being able to collaborate remotely with as much efficiency as possible is key. I use ",[20,1895,1268],{"href":1266,"rel":1896},[24]," because I can just send them an HTML link to the prototype that they can open on any browser. They don't need to have a copy of ",[20,1899,8],{"href":1256}," to see it. I can also make real-time changes during these conversations to adjust the interactions as we iterate.",[57,1902,1904],{"id":1903},"convincing-the-team","Convincing the Team",[13,1906,1907],{},"There were many questions we had to work through as a team. How do we incorporate those other products? What would the content look like? How would the transitions look and feel? How would you interact with it? What happens when you scroll down the page? How would it look on various devices? The simplest solution was to quickly build a prototype to simulate what this would feel like and share it with everyone on the team during the design exploration stage. I was able to focus the conversation on the carousel interaction and how that affected the overall experience. Doing that gave us additional insight to things we needed to avoid or change. This was all done in a distributed work environment using Axure Share.",[300,1909,1910],{},[13,1911,1912],{},"The simplest solution was to quickly build a prototype to simulate what this would feel like and share it with everyone on the team during the design exploration stage. I was able to focus the conversation on the carousel interaction and how that affected the overall experience. Doing that gave us additional insight to things we needed to avoid or change.",[57,1914,1916],{"id":1915},"evolving-the-design-in-real-time","Evolving the Design in Real Time",[13,1918,1919],{},"The original concept was to slide the images from left to right. But with this concept, where we showed the product overlaid on multiple backgrounds, worked much better as a fade. We also were able to fine tune the duration and style of the fade once we got to see it on the prototype I built with Axure. I was able to quickly make enhancements to the wires to test out the concept and share that with my colleagues in real time.",[13,1921,1922],{},"We wouldn't have been able to work through all the complexities of the interaction with just a wireframing tool. When you work with an interactive prototype, it helps us think through all the visual requirements. In this case, when we prototyped the interaction, we realized that the rotating images had to be perfectly angled and aligned with the fixed image that's overlaid on top for the entire concept to work. Once we figured that out, we were able to develop guidelines for the content based how our final iteration in the prototype.",[57,1924,1926],{"id":1925},"looping-in-developers","Looping in Developers",[13,1928,1929,1930,1935],{},"We're usually given a project proposal document and a basic design brief at the start of a project. These are living, breathing documents that change as we go along. We typically build wireframes and get a round of feedback from our client. When the wires are approved, we move on to the visual design and copywriting phase. After the client signs off on the copy and ",[20,1931,1934],{"href":1932,"rel":1933},"https://www.sketchapper.com/",[24],"visual designs",", the project moves into development and quality assurance. I like to do checks with the development team along the way to make sure what we're designing is realistic. That helps to reduce development cycles later.",[57,1937,1280],{"id":1279},[13,1939,1940],{},"Before we presented the concept to our client, we were able to get internal consensus by flushing out all the issues and incorporating everyone's tweaks through changes we made in the prototype. This got us alignment internally, so when we made our presentation, we were all behind the proposal.",[300,1942,1943],{},[13,1944,1945],{},"Internal alignment is key to getting external buy-in.",[13,1947,1948],{},"Often, the client would ask questions of various team members about what they think or whether something would work. When you have internal alignment, each person can respond that they'd already considered the various aspects and discussed it with the team. Internal alignment is key to getting external buy-in. That was true in this case. I'd say the prototyping exercise we did over Axure Share helped us get there faster, reducing what would have taken at least two meetings with the client into one. All this took took a little more than four weeks from concept to launch.",[57,1950,1952],{"id":1951},"key-takeaways","Key Takeaways",[13,1954,1955,1958],{},[134,1956,1957],{},"Align internally before presenting externally."," Politics notwithstanding, clients are more hesitant when they sense a lack of alignment on project direction. The default behavior is to solicit the opinion of the person on the team with whom they have a relationship. That could be the developer, the visual designer, the business analyst or someone who may only be tangentially involved in the project. Secure their support before making the big presentation. It's especially important when that person works in a different location, leading to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind tendency.",[13,1960,1961,1964],{},[134,1962,1963],{},"It's okay to break design rules."," In this project, that meant using an image carousel, among the most scorned UI elements. But when there are many stakeholders and limited screen real estate, carousels can help accommodate more interests. \"Inside organizations, you have many folks fighting for space,\" John said. \"You need to find ways to make peace. That's that real world.\"",[13,1966,1967,1970],{},[134,1968,1969],{},"Use prototyping tools that let you collaborate online in real-time."," There is a saying that a prototype is worth 1,000 meetings. For this project, being able to demonstrate the concept and make modifications in near real-time using Axure Share helped overcome reluctance over using a carousel. Starting with several initial mockups, shared via a URL link to distributed team members, John's team was able to think through the design as John modified the designs to take into account a number of scenarios brought up during the meeting. Changes are reflected in the shared file, which other team members can view from any location.",[506,1972],{},[57,1974,1976],{"id":1975},"about-john-henry-krahenbuhl","About John Henry Krahenbuhl",[13,1978,1979,1980,1985,1986,1991],{},"John is a Lead User Experience Designer with Epsilon, a global digital marketing firm with more than 7,000 associates working in 70 offices worldwide. Prior to joining Epsilon, John spent 19 years as an engineer and user experience prototyper at Motorola, where he earned nine patents for his work designing hardware interfaces. He's also the author of three books about Axure (",[20,1981,1984],{"href":1982,"rel":1983},"https://www.packtpub.com/books/info/authors/john-henry-krahenbuhl",[24],"Packt Publishing","). The latest, \"",[20,1987,1990],{"href":1988,"rel":1989},"https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/axure-prototyping-blueprints",[24],"Axure Prototyping Blueprints",",\" came out in August. John is pursuing a Master's Degree in Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology and has a Bachelors of Science with a focus in eBusiness from the University of Phoenix as well as an Associate of Science in Computer Science from Harper College.",[13,1993,1994],{},[16,1995,1996,1999],{},[134,1997,1998],{},"Please Note:"," Because much of John's work is confidential, we are unable to divulge the name of the client and several other details of the project. The opinions expressed in this article are the opinions of John Krahenbuhl, and do not reflect the opinions or views of Epsilon Data Management, LLC, its parent company, affiliates, and/or subsidiaries. Reference herein to any methods, strategies, services, products, or other information, do not constitute or imply any endorsement by Epsilon Data Management, LLC, its parent company, affiliates, and/or subsidiaries, of such methods, strategies, services, products, or other information.",{"title":168,"searchDepth":169,"depth":169,"links":2001},[2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007,2008,2009,2010,2011],{"id":412,"depth":169,"text":413},{"id":430,"depth":169,"text":431},{"id":1877,"depth":169,"text":1878},{"id":1889,"depth":169,"text":1890},{"id":1903,"depth":169,"text":1904},{"id":1915,"depth":169,"text":1916},{"id":1925,"depth":169,"text":1926},{"id":1279,"depth":169,"text":1280},{"id":1951,"depth":169,"text":1952},{"id":1975,"depth":169,"text":1976},[1857,1851,173],"2015-12-15T00:00:00.000Z","John Henry Krahenbuhl, Lead User Experience Designer at Epsilon and author of several books on prototyping, walks us through a recent client project that used interactive prototypes to quickly gather consensus around a design challenge--how to satisfy multiple client stakeholder interests on a single page.",{"src":2016},"/images/2019/04/usmhpmt5sj0.jpg",{},"/blog/john-henry-krahenbuhl-on-collaborating-with-a-distributed-team",{"src":2016},{"title":1841,"description":2014},"blog/john-henry-krahenbuhl-on-collaborating-with-a-distributed-team","fc1F00y_JYrSmiTiVBGQhgskFSkWj-93fGN2UXrKbS0",126]