Sep 8, 2020
UX 1.17 | Design/Development Process
From our F1P3 User Test Results, we decided we were ready to move into development. To start, our team came together to establish the tools and processes we wished to adopt for design/development. This is important because our collaborators come from different companies and handle the design and development process differently, so establishing a common ground helps keep everyone aligned when executing.
I. Design/Development Tools
Here are the tools our design team selected, based on what they are most familiar with and what we had already previously used in our designs.
Here are the tools and tech-stack our development team selected, based on what they are familiar with and what we think would be best for a quick MVP.
II. Design/Development Process
After establishing our tools, we dove into the handoff process between designers and developers. Here’s what we established based on what everyone was familiar with, and what we felt would work best for our team.
Leveraging a scrum approach with an agile mentality, we wanted to operate in three week sprints that brought items from our product backlog into our Designer Sprint Backlog. The items completed after a design sprint would feed into the Developer Sprint Backlog, where our developers would then choose the priority items to take on for their developer sprint. Items not completed would be added back to the previous backlog to take on for the next sprint.
To adopt this approach, we needed to first break up our product and existing designs into user stories. User stories are short descriptions of a specific task a user wants to perform on our platform to achieve a specific outcome. They are from the perspective of the user, and written in the language that our users would use. The reason for breaking everything into user stories is for our designers and developers to easily take on small, measurable, and independent tasks during the sprint.
Tying this to where we are now, our Design Sprint Backlog will draw from the user stories that we want to build with our next feature: User Accounts. For our Developer Sprint Backlog, they will draw from the user stories completed with our F1P3 designs.
Within each sprint, selected stories will be expanded to each include an acceptance criteria, which are specifications needed to dictate when a user story is complete.
Now that we have our design/development tools and processes established, we are ready to move into our first design and development sprints!
