"Customers don’t buy products. They pull them into their life to make progress" — Clayton Christensen

Customers not only buy products for the sake of having them but choose the products they believe will solve a problem they're facing or help to improve their lives.

An example I can think of would be a robot vacuum cleaner. Despite its higher cost, it offers convenience by allowing users to delegate cleaning tasks, especially when they're busy in comparison to a regular vacuum cleaner.

Through this fun Agile activity by drawing and selling cakes, I learned that we should not be afraid to make mistakes and show draft/incomplete work to the users/stakeholders. By embracing early feedback with the draft and skeleton works from the users/stakeholders, we can validate areas for improvement earlier and make adjustments before any significant investment. This approach will allow us to have the flexibility to change and minimize cost and effort.

How is the activity connected to the first two elements of UX?

This activity requires us to understand the needs of the users and the objectives of designing the product. (Strategy)

Through the validation process, we can continuously refine the product's scope by ensuring the product we're building meets user needs and aligns with the project goals from time to time. This agile approach allows us to identify and prioritize the most valuable features while potentially eliminating less critical elements based on user feedback. (Scope)

As the time and cost for maintaining a team/squad is limited, the focus would be to accomplish the user goals in the user stories.

How do UX designer fit in scrum?

I learnt that the UX designer in essence actually works 1 sprint before the development team so that they are able to propose and prepare designs for user stories which would be developed by the engineers in the upcoming sprint. This time also allows the designers to do the research/testing/iterations needed.

Through the activity, I learnt that moving quickly and getting the product out to the customer is a key step in the process. Obtaining quick validation through testing and user feedback, we are able to unlock value for our user fast and also quickly improve upon our product for the next release.

UX Designers are in charge of writing the user stories and acceptance criteria which is essential as it serves as part of handoff to the developers and QA team. This is information will also be critical to the customer enterprise team to know the expectations of the features to relay accurately to the customers of upcoming features and necessary preparation of documents.

I find it interesting and the importance of how a well-organised sitemap helps in both intuitive user experience, but also in terms of site ranking on search engine optimisation. 

For websites with medium to large content, often use the footer component to reflect the sitemap details. Therefore, similar to what was shared in class whereby really understanding users expect information to be organised, helps in terms of accessibility of information. Also, considerations for scalability of the structure, preventing it to be cluttered and bloated helps in terms of maintenance and management of the structure.

But sometimes it's really a fine line between inconveniencing users and dark UX, and I wonder how to tell them apart. Perhaps like ethics, if you're ashamed to speak of it, it means that you're probably doing something wrong?