Understanding Kanban & Scrum Tactics for UX Designers

If you’ve been even remotely around or in the website and software development industry in the last 20 years, you’ve heard of Agile. Agile principles focus on self-organized teams delivering products in an iterative, collaborative way. As an approach, it focuses on limited cycle time with the hope of narrowing work in progress (WIP), lending more flexibility and faster delivery from teams. It borrows much from Lean project management methodology, but with a few key differences.

Agile started as a software-based approach in the 1990s with the popular rise of personal computers, but in recent years, has found a home in leading tech companies around the world — especially on development teams and software teams — but has since extended into digital agencies, website production, management teams, and user experience (UX) design.

Within Agile lives two approaches that many teams follow to build a solid foundation of work and collaboration: Kanban and Scrum. Both focus on the prioritization of tasks and products, and help structure how the team works. So which should a UX design team use?

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a method within Agile based on visualizing work, often on a physical or digital board where all projects and work items are transparently shared and seen by the team, often on task cards. People within UX teams using Kanban focus on limiting work in progress and finding efficient ways to get from start to finish. Kanban’s major focus is process and flow of work within the team.

How to Apply Kanban to UX Design

UX designers often have a series of steps in what they do and the customer-first experiences they create and deliver. The order in which designers “design” may change depending on the person, but the same deliverables and stages are often synonymous throughout the UX design industry.

The Kanban methodology is a process-focused approach that allows UX designers to build cards or tasks that can be visible to other members of the UX design or cross-disciplinary team, often on what’s called a Kanban board. To use Kanban, honest and transparent tasks are required to keep the flow of work moving in the right direction.

For example, a UX designer might build visual task cards for:

• Design discovery
• User research, such as heatmapping
• User journeys and audience mapping
• Stakeholder interviews
• Competitive review
• Accessibility audit
• Wireframe development
• Applying revisions to wireframe
• Concept development
• Applying revisions to concepts
• Building concepts (development)
• Testing iterations
• Quality assurance review

And even between these tasks might more detailed steps exist. Atlassian recommends task card attachments, which can make information about the task more visible to the team. Information like who’s assigned to the task, when it needs to be completed, and expected time to complete can make the visual representation even more valuable to everyone involved.

While some of these cards may fall directly on the UX designer(s) — like wireframe development — other team members may be involved, such as content strategists and information architects, UX researchers, content writers, and fellow developers.

Benefits of Kanban Cards in UX Design

Kanban’s visibility lends many benefits to UX teams and designers. Those who’ve made the switch to Kanban have found that it helps:

Identify obstacles and inefficiencies

Katia Dickinson found Kanban was a great choice for her, especially as the sole UX professional on an information technology team. Where to-do lists grew quickly and became difficult to commit to finishing, learning the Kanban method helped her create sticky notes and task cards that made her work more visible, limited too much work in progress, and made it easier for her to plan ahead.

Not only to visualize work and prioritize tasks properly but also to adopt a healthier way of working, I created my first personal Kanban board on the whiteboard in my cube.

Katia Dickinson, UX Designer

Sometimes things are out of your control, like unplanned or unexpected requests or needs from the team, or stakeholders with conflicting priorities. By planning your cards for a project in advance, you can predict where obstacles might come up, giving you and your team time to set up proverbial guardrails that better define expectations and leaves time for additional collaboration or problem-solving if needed.

Create feedback loops

Because work is visual and the team is acknowledging work that’s complete or needs collaboration, Kanban also inspires feedback loops between teams. While UX designers are often experts as understanding user needs and requirements, they still may need help getting the right words in place, or thinking outside the box. That’s where Kanban cards can help.

With visualized tasks, feedback loops are built organically among the team, leaving opportunities not only for collaboration, but for honest sharing that builds trust and expertise among all members of the team.

Effectively plan and execute work

Kanban also helps teams effectively plan and execute work. With visual tasks, a UX designer can more easily prioritize needs and order of work to be done while understanding timeframes, making planning easier for the rest of the UX team.

This doesn’t only help teams tackle how they do work, but can help project managers and leaders effectively scope and price projects for clients, both internal and external. As the work is visualized, teams may also reveal processes that can trim time in the future, making the team more agile (or flexible) and reliable for standard deliverables in the future.

Encourage collaboration

Most importantly, Kanban keeps work moving forward. The accessible and physical task cards let teams rally around work that needs to be done, eliminating adding additional work in progress until more high-priority tasks are done. It also allows teams to understand where collaboration is needed, such as between content writers and designers, or information architects and developers.

UX is seldom done in a vacuum, and shouldn’t be. The Kanban method nurtures the opportunity for UX designers and professionals to work together to build deliverables that meet the needs both inside and outside the team.

What is Scrum?

Scrum process dictates that cross-functional teams — or Scrum teams — focus together on the work, which is planned and iterated through short periods of time, also called sprints. The self-organizing team, a similar board to Kanban called a Scrum board, visualizes the work to build iterations, share feedback and focus on continuous improvement through the workflow. The Scrum board is home to the sprint planning and the sprint backlog, both of which help the Scrum teams to plan ahead for delivery.

And it’s a popular method: In 2017, the Project Management Institute found that 71% of organizations report using an Agile approach for projects in an effort to minimize waste and improve project deliveries.

Scrum teams also have specific roles tasked with helping the team stay agile — including product owners, who help set priorities of the product backlog, and Scrum masters who help the Scrum team identify roadblocks and WIP limits. Both roles monitor the progress of the team and help team members work in achievable sprints.

There is also a process for Scrum meetings. Sprint planning happens at the beginning of each sprint and is used to prioritize the backlog items. A daily Scrum standup lets the team share what’s moving, what’s stalled, and where a team member might need assistance. At the end of each sprint are review and retrospective meetings. The sprint review is for showcasing the work that was completed during the sprint and the sprint retrospective is used to reflect on the sprint, identify any issues that are slowing down the process, and devise a plan of action to resolve them.

More importantly, however, is that the team remains focused on the goal while respecting each other and delivering the best product possible.