By Mahmoud Hossameldin (mkhossameldin@edu.hse.ru)

Scaling UX is hard because, unlike Engineering, it involves art. After years of learning and reading about UX and customer development, I believe the most feasible way to scale them to large systems is Design Sprint Process by Jake Knapp which is being used by large corporates and enterprises like Google, Slack, and Airbnb. In this essay, we will see if it is still the case.

NEC Corporation developed new methodologies to enable scaling UX [1]. The challenges a UX engineer faced where following the regular UX methods were:

• Organizational restrictions which don’t allow for sufficient evaluation of existing systems.
• Limited time which makes it difficult to understand complex, wide-ranging operational details.
• Insufficient explanation within documents which results in frequent inquiries from design departments.
• Insufficient understanding of the background and foundations of operations which leads to an inability to judge whether or not customer requests can be met.
• The future inconsistencies with the tentative documents because of the fact that no decision can be made unless the design is approved.

NEC’s UX improvement framework provides the methodology to solve particular problems by systematizing a basic UX improvement process based on their engineers’ experiences resulting in an efficient understanding of the customer intentions and avoiding unexpected reworking when scaled.

One of the examples of the framework is a standardized UI creation process that reflects the intention of customers by identifying representative screens once the screens have been classified. Another example is a standardized process for the creation of a screen design to simplify reaching a final decision because of the variety of opinions caused by the fact that screen look depends on individual taste and preferences.

The processes include using quantitative evaluation tools to enable UX engineers to become aware of experiences that couldn’t be detected through conventional qualitative evaluation tools to support the understanding of needs during observation of user actions.

Jason Culbertson, Design Director at Airbnb developed a 4-step framework [2] based on the research he conducted with product design leaders at Airbnb, Gusto, Pinterest, Slack, Atlassian, and other companies to provide some ideas to build processes upon. This framework is represented as a hierarchy or a pyramid that is topped by process scaling.

The 1st step is Tools & Systems. They shape the base of the pyramid that enables quality and consistency across the various products. Cloud-based tools that facilitate communication with other teams in different offices and time zones, allow UX engineers to update and reuse approved design patterns to create consistency across different projects, offer full control of interactive and visual fidelity, versioning, and permissions are the preferred tools to use.

UX System is needed once the team grows beyond 15 UX Engineers and the organization expands beyond 500 employees. A system consists of building blocks, UI patterns, rules, and guidelines. Salesforce Lightning [3] and Airbnb DLS [4] are examples. This helps speed up the developers' work and helps with the long-term maintenance.

The 2nd step is Team Structure. It’s advised to hire T-shaped UX engineers with solid experience in one area and enough knowledge to fill in other roles as needed resulting in less knowledge gap between team members.

The 3rd step is Collaboration. Hold interviews with senior UX engineers to learn each person’s process, compare similarities and differences, and create a new standardized process for the next project. On a weekly basis review how the process performs and what challenges each person is facing with collaboration. It’s also recommended to hold recurring working sessions in which the collaborative process is iterated, this includes standups, critiques, 1:1s, etc. on a daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis. The 4th step is Culture. To have sustainable UX processes we need to build a sustainable design culture across the organization and within the UX team with design nudges and a UX vision.

Design Sprint is a weeklong step-by-step process in which we solve big problems, create new products or improve existing ones, and test them with real users [5]. We start with a challenge or a problem and end up with a high-fidelity prototype tested with five users in less than a week. It has started at Google with Jake Knapp who developed the concept then moved to Google Ventures where he perfected the framework and tested it on more than 150 startups and finally Jake and his partner John Zeratsky published a book called Sprint where they outlined the process step by step. Since its publication in 2016 the sprint was used worldwide by leading startups like Slack, eBay, Airbnb, HP, Netflix, Uber, Google, Amazon, Lufthansa, and many more to speed the processes and test the ideas faster.

The first part of the sprint is built from a series of workshops. Each workshop is built around the tangible outcome and consists of a series of exercises. In the workshops, we gather the key stakeholders including the CEO or anybody who could be a decider for the sprint, somebody from the Product team, someone from Marketing, someone from R&D, a designer, and somebody that is familiar with the users like Sales or Customer Success. Including the facilitator, it’s recommended that there will be 5 to 7 participants but in no way more than 9.

The process is as follows: the 1st workshop is all about focusing on the challenge and aligning the team, the 2nd workshop is about creating many different options and possible solutions, the 3rd workshop is about curating and deciding on a solution, and the last one is about creating a plan of what the prototype would look like. The next two steps include Prototyping day and finally, the last steps are all about user testing and getting actionable results.

So we basically go from nothing to a tested prototype in about a week. The original sprint as described in the book included 5 days and assumed the team is all present in one room for 3 days for the workshops, through the years the sprint has evolved and fine-tuned. One of the big changes was the realization that in many organizations it’s difficult to allocate 3 days with all key stakeholders. The way we practice the sprint when we do it in person is to do some more preparation work so we are able to do the full cycle in only 4 days of which 2 are workshops days. When we started to work remotely it was adjusted again, changes to the framework were added to the sprint, and it was noticed that it’s very hard for people to sit in front of the computer for 2 days so the schedule was tweaked but kept the process the same. Instead of 2 days workshops, we do them in 3-4 hours workshops.

Companies face scalability challenges at every corner, from having the most impact with limited resources to scaling up design capacity, managing distributed teams, or understanding customer journeys in overwhelmingly complex environments and the challenge of remaining customer-centric as we navigate matrixed organizations, functional silos, and hierarchical reporting structures and getting org leaders on board to help scale UX.

In the past decade, companies tried ways and workflows to scale UX to large systems so many solutions were invented like Lean UX which focuses on product development as a whole instead of just design as a specific part of it, UX UI in R&D, Baby-Step UX, Six Sigma UX UI, Customer-Driven UX, and even the integration of UX and DevOps.

Design Sprint is the most feasible and commonly used way to scale UX to large systems by industry leaders, large corporates, and IT giants.

The biggest difference between Design Sprint and Design Thinking is that Design Thinking is more of a philosophy and mindset and a bunch of different tools, the Design Sprint takes the principles from Design Thinking and principles from Lean Startup and creates a recipe that we can repeat to come up with a new product or business ideas and test them with real users as quickly as possible.

It solves almost all the problems known in UX like time limitation, operational details, insufficient explanations, and frequent inquiries from different teams by condensing the workshops into two days with all the key stakeholders resulting in a prototype in just 4 days which in my opinion makes it more valuable than all other solutions especially UX and DevOps integration and Lean UX because it combines all of the systems together in a simpler and faster way.

1. UX Improvement Framework for Large-Scale System Development. https://www.nec.com/en/global/techrep/journal/g13/n03/pdf/130307.pdf

2. Scaling UX at Airbnb: The 4-Step Framework. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKJGliVeRzU&ab_channel=UXPin

3. Salesforce Lightning. https://www.salesforce.com/campaign/lightning/

4. Airbnb DLS. https://airbnb.design/tag/dls/

5. The Design Sprint. https://www.thesprintbook.com/the-design-sprint

6. Scaling Your UX Strategy. https://hbr.org/2013/01/scaling-your-ux-strategy

7. Incorporating agile UX design into your DevOps process. https://medium.com/@ltepperman/incorporating-agile-ux-design-into-your-devops-process-b2936491dc9

8. Integrating UX work with agile development through user stories. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343793194_Integrating_UX_work_with_agile_development_through_user_stories_An_action_research_study_in_a_small_software_company