UX Success

The Tripwire R&D Team celebrating product launch with Willamette Jet Boats - (The author is in the background getting hosed)

First the fun part — here’s what we do for team building after a product launch …….  a two hour speedboat ride on the Willamette up to the abandoned paper mill in Oregon City….

http://www.flickr.com/photos/65122491@N06/sets/72157627672561802

I’ve been reflecting on the Agile principal:  Responding to change over following a plan…

We have revolving-door UX sessions weekly with user surrogates face to face. We have 10 people who are committed to 15 minute sessions on the half hour every Monday. That way, we can divvy up the projects and each of the 3 scrum teams gets at least 3 sessions. We also swap our participants around to avoid fatiguing them with the same project. Generally, we are validating IXD concepts with Balsamiq Mockup click-thrus that represent our “happy path hypothesis” We record those sessions with Silverback. The UX person gives the report out immediately when the sessions are done and archives the recorded sessions so that we can do further analysis later.

Every sprint we strive to do one longer  session with Real Users — (customers who have signed up to be “UX Lab Rats”.  )  In a nutshell, these are 45 minute sessions — remote testing. I use WebEx and share an application — live code (working behind) or a prototype (working ahead). We record it — but also encourage developers and product managers to dial in (stay mute) and observe real-time.

This program has been the most influential in getting people to understand that what UX and UCD is all about — people using the stuff that we are building to solve their problems.

I believe the UX validation cycle be the single most important contribution we have made in working towards a delightful product experience for our users. Last week I got some feedback from the field that was  music to my ears.  A customer wrote a note back to the sales rep after upgrading and using the new feature :
“Side note — upgraded our console to 8.1 and am having an absolute blast setting up tag sets (and tagging profiles, to automatically apply tags).
It’s already giving me so much more visibility to the nodes.  LOVE IT! “

This is the kind of feedback UX lives for!   The success the field is seeing  is directly related to having UX sitting on those SCRUM teams  — designing solutions for developers to execute on – yes,  but most importantly, conducting consistent revolving door UX sessions with customers and folding their feedback directly and incrementally into the product — from lo-fidelity conception all the way through to code freeze.

here’s the link to the press release:
http://www.tripwire.com/company/news/pressrelease/new-release-of-tripwire-enterprise-delivers-smart-scaleable-and-strategic-security-configuration

Note,

When I joined Tripwire a year ago to “do User Experience (a.k.a.UX)” — literally right off the road from designing mobile freight logistics management tools for truck drivers,  I knew I’d be jumping into something different and challenging.  But I really  had no idea.     What I did not fully realize,  is that in the IT security and compliance business there is not just  “lots of data to make sense of “.    Oh, no….. there is a constant broadcast of sound and fury in the form of event logs that may or may not signify something, plus a ton-and-a-half of  other STUFF – devices, platforms, applications, policies, owners, geographies, compliance requirements *phew* – that administrators have to keep track of.  No wonder, that people who are responsible for controlling the security of their IT infrastructure can get totally hassled and overwhelmed.

I’ve learned a lot about IT security and how people interact with massive amounts of information in that context this past year.  The upcoming release will mark a product I started working on last June — a product that was informed by a consistent, methodological UX practice from design through release.  The resulting  product  has been consistently and iteratively designed and tested with people who are or might be users in sessions focusing on  accommodating some of their IT security management and administration needs  through a (dare I say it?)  pleasurable user experience.   The fruit of our efforts has sprung up from the seeds of genius planted by our product team  into fertile research and development soil that is cultivated through constant user validation.

1. We establish some high level goals for what we want to test.
2. Write a “happy path” story.
3. Build screens that mimic the actual behavior of the application.
4. Put together a “happy path click thru that matches the scenario.
5. Invite people to participate .

Note: This post was originally published on the Tripwire Blog : The State of Security found at this link- http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/off-topic/ux-lab-rats-dont-race/