Three books to read on agile methodology and the place of the end-user in the creative process

In 2011, the company Color caused a sensation by raising 41 million dollars in Series A from prestigious funds such as Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. The idea? To develop a photo-sharing application based on geolocation that aimed to connect users by allowing them to share images and videos with people nearby. Despite the initial enthusiasm, the project was a fiasco.

The reasons? An inability to place the user at the heart of the application's creative process coupled with an inability to react quickly to their feedback once the application was released. The interface was indeed deemed too complex, particularly the photo-sharing journey. Some features seemed poorly arranged with, for example, difficulties in locating sharing or privacy settings options.

The lesson to be learned from this failure seems twofold to me:

Nothing beats a bit of theory to understand how to strengthen your product vision by refocusing on your users. These three books should help you!

"User Story Mapping" is an essential book for those who wish to understand how to integrate end-user needs into the development process. The User Story Mapping is a method for visualising features to be developed for an application, with the aim of mapping them according to the key stages of the user journey. The book demonstrates the advantages of this method, which helps teams to better understand user needs, by favouring early and in-depth dialogue with them. It also provides practical techniques and advice for creating story maps effective ones, which allow for better planning and organisation of development tasks. By applying this method, teams can create products that meet the real needs of users, while respecting time and budget constraints. A basic guide to immerse yourself in the fundamentals of agile methodology!

"Sprint" is a book co-authored by three members of Google Ventures who propose a methodical approach to quickly solve complex problems and test new ideas in just five days. This method, called "Sprint", is based on the collaboration of a multidisciplinary team and rapid prototyping, which helps to reduce the risks and costs associated with the development of new products or new features. The idea is to start with a day of in-depth understanding of user needs, followed by the design of a quick solution and the creation of a prototype, then user testing to validate the proposed solution. At the end of these five days, a feature or a product will have been conceived and tested ready for deployment! The important thing, beyond the one-week timeframe proposed by the authors, is to immerse yourself in their obsession with the end-user in product design!

The book emphasises the importance of continuous learning and rapid iteration in the design process. The authors propose practical techniques for conducting fast and effective user tests, to quickly validate hypotheses and to integrate user feedback into the design process. They finally show how Agile and Lean methodologies can inform this approach: “Lean UX is not a process. It’s a mindset. It’s about working together to solve the right problems in the right way, by testing our assumptions and learning from real people at every stage of the process.”