In Search of Truth: At the Crossroad of Critical Theory and Technology in the DesOps World

[This is the paper I delivered at Department of English, Baba Bhairabananda Autonomous Mahavidyalaya, Jajpur, Odisha (http://bbmchandikhole.org/) on 16th July]

Abstract:

This UGC seminar session was an attempt to understand, from a non-traditional lens, the relevance of critical theory in context to today’s ever-changing technology space that is moving towards the Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Distributed Computing, become much more important in history than ever, as it deals with softer aspects of human identity and socio-cultural dimension through communication or human expression.

This interactive session will have two major focus:

1. A brief overview of the critical theories from a diachronic lens that will be helping the students in grasping the fundamentals in a socio-cultural context.

2. A cross-discipline comparison with the modern design-driven practices in the software industry that would help the students understand the potential and opportunities in the real world scenario where these theories would help.]

Download Link:

https://www.slideshare.net/MobileWish/in-search-of-truth-at-the-crossroad-of-critical-theory-and-technology-in-desops-world-16-july-2018-bbautonomus-college-chandikhol

More info:

http://desops.io/2018/07/17/download-the-paper-in-search-of-truth-at-the-crossroad-of-critical-theory-and-technology-in-desops-world/

The DesOps Enterprise -Re-invent Your Organization : (Volume 1) The Overview & Culture

Paperback on DesOps

The DesOps Enterprise -Re-invent Your Organization : (Volume 1) The Overview & Culture

http://a.co/cdPAwPU

In this three-parts book series, we will be touching upon the practical approaches on how to prepare for this next-wave in service-design of that compliments DevOps in the concepts of a cultural shift, collaboration and automation. We will also see what are the available solutions today that contribute to bringing the full circle of design in the context of software development lifecycle.

This book series aims to deliver the explorations and insights into the modern approach to design, as a creative process, spanning across the whole gamut of

disciplines like Product Management, Marketing Management, Market & User Research, Interaction Designing, Information Architecture, Quality Assurance, Product/Service Strategy and Delivery etc.Current, the first volume of the series, deals with the fundamental principles and explores the cultural aspect of DesOps. To implement successful Design driven organization, it is important that every member of the enterprise must understand and believe in design (unlike the popular belief of it being a discipline of visual arts) as a creative approach to problem solving to capture delight and in this light be a part of the design operations which encompass from envisioning of the product till delivery of it as a delight to the end-users and customers.

5″ x 8″ (12.7 x 20.32 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper.

Paperback and Kindle eBook version.

ISBN-13: 978-1720635062

ISBN-10: 1720635064

“When/If – Then” Tool – Printable Version to Capture Assumptions in Design Process

“When/If – Then” Tool – Printable Version (for A4 size paper) by @mobilewish https://www.slideshare.net/MobileWish/when-if-thentoolbarebonesamirdashccbysa

Basically, this”When/If – Then” Tool is helpful than the traditional elaborative templates to capture assumptions, as it was straightforward and can be used with a minimal explanation to a cross-functional crowd, a large portion of such population may not be accustomed towards the use the typical Tools and methodologies. The “When/If – Then” Tool is synonymous with the typical cause-and-effect kind of flow that is understood by and large and required very minimal explanation, and can be like any other UCD tools, can be constructed using simple post-its or printed formats.

Feel free to download and use.

Licence:
“When/If – Then” Tool by Samir Dash, 2018
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License

DesOps : the Next Wave in Design (Part 9) Lean Methodologies & Hypothesis-Driven Design

I believe that any hypothesis statement can be cultivated from the bare-bones model of causeand effect being rendered as a formalized statement of ” if …. then” or ” when … then”kind of format. At least this gives a more practical approach to build a real-world Hypothesis-Driven Design based system which is technically feasible and is the essence of any DesOps system .

The second life-line as pointed out in the dimension of ‘Culture’ is “Cultural Shift towards Lean Philosophies” (Refer the part 5 of the current series here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/desops-next-wave-design-part-5-definition-3-dimensions-samir-dash/ ). In this part of the series, we will be deep diving for the same.

Typically any lean methodologies are based two basic goals:

Helping the organization understanding customer value
Using the key processes of the organization to continuously increase it and work towards delivering a perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process with zero waste.

In the context of Design and User Experience(UX), in the seminal book Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf, provides some lean methodologies break the stalemate between the speed of Agile and the need for design in product development lifecycle” [Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seidenjeff, The Lean UX]. If we observe closely, the basic foundations of Lean UX prescribed are common to the core Lean philosophies, namely:

Remove Wastage from Design Process — Moving away from heavy documentation to a process that creates artefacts which can be directly used in the design and development lifecycle itself.
Cross-functional Collaboration — All the stakeholders from any parts of the product lifecycle including the designer, developers, quality experts, analysts, marketers and end-users all collaborate in a transparent and productive way.
Experimentation Based Iterative Execution — So fundamentally it alludes to the UCD core principles, that assumes that the designer (or the team) learns from the execution of the prototypes in an iterative cycle that starts early in the product lifecycle, from which the learning is used as an input to improve the product along the way. If you notice this is the very basis of what we talked about the continuous and integrated feedback loop.

The use of Agile and Design Thinking practices can be seen alluding to the philosophies above. However, regarding the third philosophy — to ensure that the designer has the right approach to conduct the experimentation so that the feedback can be used in a productive way to take informative decision making along the way across the design process requires some non-ambiguous methodologies that can help the designer making some assumption and validate that through experimentation. This is the basis of one of the core foundations of Lean UX and related lean methodologies, which is popularly known as Hypothesis-Driven Design (HDD). As any design that we produce is based on certain assumption and HDD provides the non-ambiguous approach to the same, that follows the third philosophy i.e. Experimentation Based Iterative Execution.

“Declaring assumptions is the first step, in Lean UX process” [Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seidenjeff, The Lean UX] . This statement reflects how the assumptions or the hypothesis is the core the Lean UX principles. Basically, the four steps in the Lean UX approach is the same blocks that appear while in HDD, and can be mapped to the following blocks:

Making Assumption / Formation of Hypothesis
Build a Prototype / Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Execute / Run the Prototype
Get Feedback / Observation

Now step 4 is the feedback loop that connects to step 1 making a cycle, thereby using the feedback from current iteration as the input to form the assumption for the next iteration.

Interestingly this means the HDD process always depends on outcomes rather than traditional outputs of any traditional process. The outcomes are kind of hints from the segment that can give direction to the design along the way and help in getting incremental validation of the vision by acting as “evidence” or the and more precisely they are the factors that help in “course correction” for the design. As the outcomes of the assumption act as pieces of evidence, it helps in making data-driven decisions.

You may ask, does that mean the design is reduced to quantitative factors which will act as evidence to support some of the designs? Now, here is the interesting aspect that helps to understand the approach — the feedback or the evidence can be either quantitative or qualitative in nature. And to avoid the risk of being limited to measurement-driven design, the qualitative perspective is provided equal footing in HDD approach. This makes a fit case for DesOps that can help in converging the technology with this philosophy to form required service design solution powered by machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation. The aspect of the actual implementation using technology is what we will be exploring in coming articles of this series, mostly while discussing the third dimension i.e. technology.

The very first step in HDD, i.e. “Making Assumption / Formation of Hypothesis” involves articulation of the assumption or the hypothesis. And this is the most important aspect of HDD, as the other steps depend on this. Typical hypothesis statement can be framed as per the following simplest form —

I think doing [this] will result in [that ].

There multiple variations to this that many professionals use in their area for HDD based research and design /development activities. Some add the factors such as the segment or the persona or the end user of the product, something like the following —

For [user / him/her ] I think doing [this] will result in [that ].

If you see the above keeps segment in a context that helps it keep focused on to specific persona, which thereby can lead to the user-centred design process. This is essentially labelled by many as a design hypothesis.

Some use additional factors of forming negation of the hypothesis by adding an attribute like whether this hypothesis is believed by him as true or false. To formulate a null hypothesis and thereby move on to define an alternate hypothesis (which is essentially a negation to the null hypothesis one craves to validate, but due to nature and structure or any metrics associated with that, it may not practically be possible to achieve that. So in such kind of cases the implicitly the state of belief is presented as another factor to take part in the validation process —

Because I think [this] is true, I think doing [this] will result in [that ].

I believe that any hypothesis statement can be cultivated from the bare-bones model of cause and effect being rendered as a formalized statement of “if …. then” or “when … then” kind of format. At least this gives a more practical approach to build a real-world HDD based system which is technically feasible and is the essence of any DesOps system.

The next important aspect in this regard is how to ensure that we are considering the qualitative aspect of the evidence, as discussed above. If we look at irrespective of the fact that there is a crowd of applications out there which claims to support the business through a data-informed approached, they are primarily a set of some variation between the extremes like A/B testing tools and data-driven analytics and data modelling based prediction systems. But if we notice with care at the core of HDD we found that the essence of HDD lies in making sense of the data and treat it as evidence so as to inject it to a UCD based process to fuel design or business decisions. Though coming up with a real-world HDD system would require similar tools and technologies of data-driven systems, but they will be supporting components to HDD based system. In this regard, the real HDD based full fledged system is literally non-existent as of today, while I am writing this article. In regards to DesOps, this makes a lot of difference, as most of the HDD frameworks out there are not 100% autonomous. Most of the implementation of HDD is mostly based on the work practices and methodologies, which is implemented depending on the need and feasibility. However, these are good enough when we use these, in context to the tools we gain from UCD, Lean models and the Design Thinking principles. But, it is interesting that the philosophies of DesOps, take it to the next level, making it autonomous and integrated with the over-arching feedback loop we have been referring many times.

To be continued… Keep tuned in.

DesOps: the Next Wave in Design (Part 8) Business Value Proposition

From a product manager’s standpoint, the successful UX meant for a business must balance between the needs of the users and the feasibility of implementation of the UX solution within the business context, and all the practices and principles of DesOps converge towards this.

Each design is a proposed business solution which is essentially is a hypothesis. Any design process — as strives to get the answer or solution to a fundamental problem — essentially starts with the problem in mind and some assumptions in mind, which is mostly a hypothesis. And to solve the problem, with the assumed hypothesis or the business value in mind, the designer iterates and if he uses User-Centered Development (UCD) approaches, he would go into the cycle of Think – Make – Test cycle. And this implicit way of solving the issue creatively uses references to different aspects of business, namely :

The complete business offering
Customer orientation and service innovation for customer relationship
Business Infrastructure
Revenue Streams
Productivity and Cost control structures

As DesOps principles and practices have Hypothesis Driven Design & Development (HDD) and UCD process as its core components, it also refers to the same business value propositions. Implementing DesOps actually takes these into consideration and tries to use technology to improve the process around these.

If we refer to any standard business model frameworks such as Business Model Canvas, a template that is popularly used for developing and investigating every important aspect of the organization. The framework in such a template outlines investigations for areas such as key partners, key activities, key resources, value propositions, customer relationship, channels, customer services, cost structure and revenue streams, which always helps to understand and identify the core goals, strengths and priorities of the business that provides the context in which the UX has to be seen. This can be seen in the following equation: “Customer needs + Business context +Technological feasibility = Successful UX making the successful product”.

In a business model, we refer to UX when we plan a strategy for “Value Proposition”. In the typical Business model Canvas, value proposition involves areas like the following, which can be seen traced back to DesOps principles & practices.

Newness: In DesOps, this is associated with “Continous Discovery” and “Design Thinking” practices.
Performance: Improving performance by optimizing the process blocks through Agile & Lean methodologies through the implementation of automation through service design approach.
Customization: DesOps implementation focuses on customizing the process blocks through service design approach and defining business process redesign/engineering.
“Getting the Job Done”: This is fundamentally the result oriented approaches taken in DesOps which touches upon different aspects like roles, cohesive team play, removing wastage through Lean methodologies and the similar.
Design: This is core to DesOps, and is seen as the creative problem-solving.
Brand/ Status: Brand and Status is well associated with the feedback loops that include the real users in context and feeding the design process with continuous feedback including brand perception and related mental model of the user of the target segment.
Price: Though purely a market associated component, the price can be dramatically reduced through implementation of DesOps, as it focuses on reducing waste and improving efficiency through automation and process improvements
Cost Reduction: It is one of the fundamental components of ROI on DesOps in an organization. DesOps helps reducing cost through service design approach to optimize and redefine business process.
Risk Reduction: DesOps helps reducing ambiguity by the implementation of optimized process and automation powered by the feedback loop that touches all the roles and the aspects be it human or machine in context. This improves reliability and thereby reduces risk.
Accessibility: Through the implementation of Design Thinking, UCD model like contextual and participatory designs and continuous feedback loop, DesOps helps to ensure the accessibility factors are in consideration while iterating over a design.
Convenience/ Usability: Through its advocacy of UCD models and Design Thinking and integrated feedback loop, DesOps help in ensuring usability aspects in all design delivered.

From a product manager’s standpoint, the successful UX meant for a business must balance between the needs of the users and the feasibility of implementation of the UX solution within the business context, and all the practices and principles of DesOps converge towards this.

DesOps: the Next Wave in Design (Part 7) The 10 Practices

A method, procedure, process, or rule used in a particular field is typically defined as practice for that field. In last article, we discovered about the 10 guiding principles that drive the DesOps. No wonder the practices involved in DesOps, loud the same principles to the core. Note that we are still discussing the culture driven by DesOps / DesignOps, that is typically fuelled by these practices.

Here are the broad practices that drive the DesOps philosophies:

1. Design Thinking

This practice ensures that we employ the creative problem solving, the typical methodologies and tools of Design thinking. Here are some quick notes and list of methodologies and tools used in IBM version of it which anyway follows the fundamental principles of Design Thinking https://medium.com/eunoia-i-o/quick-guide-notes-on-the-ibm-design-thinking-78490d7433dd.

The typical tools of Design Thinking, such as Stakeholders map, Experience maps (As Isand To Be), Personae, Roadmap, MVP, Kano Modelling, Story Boarding, Priority Grid etc. are coupled with continuous practices defined in the following to implement the Continuous Loop of the Design Thinking practice that holds the DesOps philosophies.

2. User-centred Design (UCD) and Usability Design

Users (both the typical user / persona from UX angle and the segment from marketing/business context ) are at the core of DesOps. Any design solution generated fundamentally is an advocacy of the user needs and tries to direct the business goals to build upon this. The business goals are also in such cases are market specific and are based on the pulse of the segments driven by the user needs. You can have a quick note on UCD and usability-design here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140702070557-9377042-usability-design-and-user-centered-design-ucd/. As UCD or Usability design focuses on the Iterative Design approach of User Centered System Design (UCSD) process this fundamentally contributes to DesOps goals.

(Fig – Source: UX Simplified: Models & Methodologies, 2014, ISBN 1500499587 )

As UCD supports growing product through iterative design that is also fuelled by all 3 models of design which contribute to typical Design Thinking as well as Lean UX models, namely:

Cooperative Design: This involves designers and users on an equal footing.
Participatory Design (PD): Inspired by Cooperative Design, focusing on the participation of users
Contextual Design: “Customer-Centered Design” in the actual context, including some ideas from Participatory Design.

And here are the steps we use while implementing UCD , irrespective of the above models we follow: All these UCD models involve more or less a set of activities grouped into the following steps mentioned below:

STEP 1 – Planning: in this stage the UCD process is planned and if needed customized. It involves understanding the business needs and setting up the goals and objectives of the UX activities. Also forming the right team for the UX needs and if needed hiring specialties fall into this step.
STEP 2 – User data collection and analysis: This step involves data collection through different applicable methodologies such as user interviews, developing personas, conducting scenarios, use-cases and user stories analysis, setting up measurable goals.
STEP 3 – Designing and Prototyping: This involves activities like card sorting, conducting IA, wireframing and developing prototyping.
STEP 4 – Content writing: this involves content refinement and writing for web and similar activities.
STEP 5 – Usability testing: This involves is a set of activities of conducting tests and heuristic evaluations and reporting to allow refinement of the product. However, Usability Testing can have its set of steps involving similar activities such as planning , Team forming, testing, review and data analysis and reporting.

And you will see all these naturally fall into the places while any DesOps is implemented.

3. Hypothesis-Driven Design/Development (HDD) & Data-driven Decisions making

The DesOps story remains incomplete without referring to one of its key practices that are Hypothesis-driven – development (HDD), which certainly contributes to the service design like DesOps, that brings possibilities of changes to inculcate design thinking, innovation and organizational changes. It also promotes the lifecycle methods and adjusts them to ensure that integrated work-flow and work-culture is established that can make the best use of data-driven decision making by running multiple early-stage experiments (synonymous with what we are trying to achieve through continuous feedback loop and prototyping) and gathering insights from their outcomes (and not just output!). Another interesting thing is that this advocates the use of UCD approaches as it focuses on making an assumption, running experimenting and validating them with measurable data, and thereby taking some action based on the same.

Will elaborate on HDD driven methodologies in context to DesOps as we move in this series of articles.

4. Agile / Iterative Life Cycle

There are several challenges in integrating UX design and related activities into a typical agile software development lifecycle process. The most common problem is typically “ finding a balance between up-front interaction design and integrating interaction design with iterative coding with the aim of delivering working software instead of early design concepts”. This happens mostly because typical pure SDLC approaches primarily aim at “efficient coding tactics together with project management and team organization instead of usability engineering”.As Agile is more “a way of thinking about creating software products’ rather than being a specific process or methodology hints at the challenges of UX integration into it as integrating user research and UX design with agile, is itself an “agile antipattern”.The very idea of SDLC is a process for developing software, traditionally never kept the “user” into a focus, or event kept any scope for methodologies that try to bring any component that is not considered as a native ingredient of the process of creating a software product. The focus was always the “cost, scope, and schedule” that drive any traditional SDLC models including Agile. And sure enough, this typically gives rise to the challenges for UX integration into any SDLC as project managers never try to upset the balance of these three by reducing costs, tightening deadlines, and adding features in the specification. To know more about the typical challenges we face while implementing design / UX into Agile SDLC read my earlier article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140706143027-9377042-challenges-in-ux-integration-with-different-sdlc-models/

(Fig – Source: UX Simplified: Models & Methodologies, 2014, ISBN 1500499587 )

However, there ways to mend this gaps between process driven life cycle models such as Agile model — one of such is to implement usability design model (we discussed that as a practice of DesOps above). Usability process supplements to any software development life cycle at various stages, as is not a complete product development process as it does not output the final product at the end of the process cycle. One such solution is reflected in below diagram :

(Fig – Source: UX Simplified: Models & Methodologies, 2014, ISBN 1500499587 )

And it is interesting to see that each cycle in such solution is actually contributing to a continuous cycle of Conceptualize – Design – Build – Test that aligns nicely with DesOpsprinciples and other practices.

5. Lean UX Approach

The Lean UX practice focuses on the Lean philosophies that focus primarily on reducing waste from the process and provide ways to simplify and expedite the delivery keeping the quality intact or enhanced. Interestingly the Lean UX is based on the 3 foundations which are also part of the DesOps practices list we are discussing:

Design Thinking: This foundation upholds the concept that “every aspect of a business can be approached with design methods” and gives “designers permission and precedent to work beyond their typical boundaries”.
Agile Software Development: Core values of Agile are the key to Lean UX.
Lean Startup method: Lean Startup uses a feedback loop called “build-measure-learn” to minimize project risk and gets teams building quickly and learning quickly

No practice used in Lean UX is something new. Rather it is “built from well-understood UX practices”. Many of the techniques used over the time in various UX process and have the practical usability even today have been packaged properly in Lean UX. So the following foundation pillars of this also supports DesOps as inherited from this practice:

Cross-Functional Teams: Specialists from various disciplines come together to form a cross-functional team to create the product. Such a team typically consists of Software engineering, product management, interaction design, visual design, content strategy, marketing, and quality assurance (QA).
Small, Dedicated, Collocated: Keep your teams small—no more than 10 total core people as keeping small team has the benefit of small teams comes down to three words: communication, focus, and camaraderie. It is easier to manage the smaller team as keeping track of status report, change management and learning.
Progress = Outcomes, Not Output: The focus should be on business goals which are typically are the “outcomes”, rather than the output product/system or service.
Problem-Focused Teams:“A problem-focused team is one that has been assigned a business problem to solve, as opposed to a set of features to implement”.
Removing Waste: This is one of the key ingredients of Lean UX which is focused on “removal of anything that doesn’t lead to the ultimate goal” so that the team resource can be utilized properly.
Small Batch Size: Lean UX focuses on “notion to keep inventory low and quality high”.
Continuous Discovery: “Regular customer conversations provide frequent opportunities for validating new product ideas”
GOOB: The New User-Centricity: GOOB stands for “getting out of the building” — meeting-room debates about user needs won’t be settled conclusively within your office. Instead, the answers lie out in the marketplace, outside of your building.
Shared Understanding: The more a team collectively understands what it’s doing and why, the less it has to depend on secondhand reports and detailed documents to continue its work.
Anti-Pattern: Rock-stars, Gurus, and Ninjas: Team cohesion breaks down when you add individuals with large egos who are determined to stand out and be stars. So more efforts should on team collaboration.
Externalizing Your Work: “Externalizing gets ideas out of teammates’ heads and on to the wall, allowing everyone to see where the team stands”.
Making over Analysis: “There is more value in creating the first version of an idea than spending half a day debating its merits in a conference room”.
Learning over Growth: “Lean UX favours a focus on learning first and scaling second”.
Permission to Fail: “Lean UX teams need to experiment with ideas. Most of these ideas will fail.The team must be safe to fail if they are to be successful”.
Getting Out of the Deliverables Business: “The team’s focus should be on learning which features have the biggest impact on the their customers. The artefacts the team uses to gain that knowledge are irrelevant.”

You can read more in one of my articles here:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140710010240-9377042-lean-ux-another-agile-ux/?

6. Fail-Fast through Prototyping

Typically a Fail-Fast is about immediately reporting any condition that is likely to indicate a failure. Also, Fail-Fast allows gathering early stage feedback that serves as an input for the continuous UCD model which helps bring up solutions to the design issues using such input and thereby minimizes the risk of product failure in the hand of users or in the market. This is also a philosophy that aligns to the Lean Startup methodology and accelerates innovation as it encourages taking early stage risk. Typically the startup cultures undertake bold experiments to determine the long-term viability of a product or strategy, rather than proceeding cautiously and investing years in a doomed approach. In service design, this helps to improve the processes to make use of systems that support Lean methodologies and model. The great part is that this in DesOps while getting combined with UCD processes, provides options to run short and quick UCD iterative cycles of Think – Make – Break kind of model.

(Fig – Source: UX Simplified: Models & Methodologies, 2014, ISBN 1500499587 )

Prototype plays a crucial role in UCD models to achieve Fail-Fast and thereby ensuring early feedback on the design is received that can contribute to the evolution of the product. Different fidelity of prototypes is used in order to ensure that the target experience can be tested.

7. Continuous Discovery

Continuous Discovery is primaily involved with the conceptualization stage of the product lifecycle. This practice mostly is driven factors like

User focus: The goals of the activity, the work domain or context of use, the users’ goals, tasks and needs should control the development.
Active user involvement: Representative users should actively participate, early and continuously throughout the entire development process and throughout the system life cycle.
Simple design representations: The design must be represented in such ways that it can be easily understood by users and all other stakeholders.
Explicit and conscious design activities: The development process should contain dedicated design activities.

This practice, however, is not just limited to conceptualization stage, but organically is part of the evaluation and build stages as the outcomes from such stages of life cycle, it gets the input of feedbacks and evaluation results which aid in the discovery of the solution through the design process.

8. Continuous builds and delivery

This practice focuses on continuous design delivery that ensures that the DesOps sustains the lifecycle and supports iterative UCD cycles. This involves the process that supports the design of the solution which thereby contributing to the system development that is iterative and incremental. The early part of life cycles involving such practice typically gains life from prototyping which is used to visualize and evaluate ideas and design solutions in cooperation with the users.

So the factors in this practices are :

Evolutionary systems development: The systems development should be both iterative and incremental.
Prototyping: Early and continuously, prototypes should be used to visualize and evaluate ideas and design solutions in cooperation with the users.

9. Integrated & incremental testing

Evaluation and getting the feedback from all stages of the lifecycle is key to any DesOpsimplementation, therefore integrated testing (including usability testing) in an incremental fashion is what that plays a stronger role among all the practices. This actually draws from the UCD models running a User Centered System Design (UCSD) approach. As UCD experts help in benchmarking usability tests popularly known as “summative evaluations” that evaluates the performance of the system /product developed on several grounds. The metrics of this test is typically based on the “error rate for users as they use the system”, the “time it takes to attain proficiency performing a task”, and the “time it takes to perform a task once proficiency has been attained”. So the factor that drives the practice is —

Evaluate use in context: Baseline usability goals and design criteria should control the development.

Note that the key here is that all the testing should support evaluations in context. In the real context of use, getting the data is what makes this effective and thereby making DesOpsmore fruitful.

(Fig – Source: Re-imagining Beta Testing in the Ever-Changing World of Automationhttps://medium.com/eunoia-i-o/re-imagining-beta-testing-in-the-ever-changing-world-of-automation-3579ac418007 )

The ISO standard also defines Quality process where context plays the major role. And interestingly Usability testing and HCI aspects are all driven by context. Read one of of my articles on how context plays a critical role in testing and usability, which also narrates an experiment named BetaStudio here – https://medium.com/eunoia-i-o/re-imagining-beta-testing-in-the-ever-changing-world-of-automation-3579ac418007 .

10. Service Design on an Integrated Feedback-Loop Model

The integrated feedback loop is actually more than getting testing reports. This practice ensures that the feedback flows from any point to any point as needed, may it be from stakeholder to Designers, or End-Users to Developer, Testers to Designers or in any path that flows from one persona to the other. Also, this includes the service design that helps to implement the DesOps which ensures the information, as well as the feedback, is flowing seamlessly even including from and to the systems and different roles. This certainly uses service design employing recent technologies like Automation, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence etc.

Hope this article was helpful. Keep tuning in for the next parts of this article series. Before moving on to next points on Culture of DesOps, we will be looking into a Business Model Canvas and try to see how DesOps fits in. Do share the words.

DesOps : the Next Wave in Design (Part 5) The Definition & the 3 Dimensions

DesOps is about defining a culture of design through improved work practices and communication among the design teams with the inter-cum-intra project/product teams and stakeholders and aiding these practices with the help of technology to bring communications among the involved tools and the arching eco-systems.

In recent times many have attempted to define the DesOps in easier words to the community. But many of those attempts never went beyond the explorations beyond the efforts put to define a Design System. In many cases in many UX communities and teams, the definitions of DesOps is limited within the scope of Design System, which in turn essentially is a meta-product i.e. a product that enables other products. Then what is the scope of DesOps?

In my view, DesOps is not only about tools or technology employed which is generally referred to the discourses about binging automation and improved process re-engineering in the engineering sense. Rather DesOps is about defining a culture of design through improved work practices and communication among the design teams with the inter-cum-intra project/product teams and stakeholders and aiding these practices with the help of technology to bring communications among the involved tools and the arching eco-systems.

So DesOps is rather a combination of —

Designing of Design Culture and Communications + Work practices + EcoSystem of Tools & Technologies

In the Designing of Design Culture basically the design process is involved to come up with a solution that takes into account the existing gaps and areas of improvement which is needed for a specific organisation where communities or a teams involved in product life cycles, (in case of Software industry, it’s more influenced from the Software Development Life Cycle ) to improve productivity, remove wastage (in terms of effort, delivery timeline, man-power etc. ) and in many cases establish a lean process and methodologies. As DesOpsis associated with these aspects, and especially the Lean Process and methodologies, it intern impacts the culture and how the team collaborate, work and communicate.

DesOps, in other words, empowers the philosophies of the Lean UX and Fail-Fast models of start-up organisations in a better way. So the process that involves the work-culture, team – communication, product feedback loops etc. are re-designed as a part of DesOpsimplementation and this is referred as Work practices.

To aid the above two, in DesOps implementation, the focus is more on automation involving certain workflow engineering to support the re-design process (referred in the paragraph above). Basically, this 3rd aspect is more about the translation of the about two aspects with the help of technologies and building and putting in places the tools to define the required eco-system that brings seamless delivery track and complement it with DevOps through continuous and integrated delivery approach with the arching feedback loop. The use of automation in this aspect improves efficiency and scales the whole process across the whole product delivery cycle and reduces wastage.

So here is a crude way to group the different dimensions of DesOps, which come into play while modelling DesOps solution for a target organisation or team. Let’s not take them literally as many of these dimensions have overlaps among them, for example, the way we work might involve components from the cultural shift dimension.

1. Culture

i. Principles & Practices

ii. Cultural Shift towards Lean Philosophies

iii. The way the team works (Mostly Design team but not excluding the intra-team work-culture)

2. Process

i. Work-flows

ii. Feedback- loop

3. Eco-System

i. Technologies

ii. Tools

iii. Design Systems

iv. Automation architectures and approaches

Stay tuned and be part of the DesOps journey with me.

DesOps : the Next Wave in Design (Part 4) The 3C’s

The Living Design System is mostly perceived all about modular design. Mostly the patterns, being the referred to the “molecules” or “organisms” as a part of “atomic design process”, are made to allow the part of structure or group. This view of the living design system brings to focus, its two major aspects — first is, of course, the creation and maintenance of patterns. The later is about coming up with a process and ensuring that these fit into a workflow that both would touch both designer and developers and make the connections among their workflows. However, this latter aspect has remained challenging even for the experienced teams across the industry.

Historically and interestingly, DesOps at the beginning , without its formal name was focusing on the areas of creation and maintenance and sharing of its modular design systems.

Historically and interestingly, DesOps at the beginning, without its formal name was focusing on the areas of creation and maintenance and sharing of its modular design systems. At the very beginning phases in the last couple of years, it was more about the organisations having the design systems and making these socialised. Primarily these design systems have consisted of visual design languages and components and widgets. These design system had defined basic goals, principles, branding (for specific organisational identity) and a visual language that helped it maintain consistency in the creation of design artefacts and assets. Along with it the UI patterns and widget libraries included in them helped to bring consistency in terms of interactions across a wider scale of interfaces within the organisation or product portfolio.

Ensuring this became part of the strategic aspect of any UX or Design team, in the organisation that were responsible for driving this. Mostly this task became the primary share of the role of the Design Directors, Leads and Principals in the organisation as a part of their goal to ensure ringing the right maturity to their design team and practices.

This was definitely a low-hanging fruit in terms of what DesOps as principle is geared towards. The return from such low-hanging fruit was helpful in many ways. Apart from the consistency, it actually helped in reducing the friction among the teams regarding the design aspect. Also it helped reducing some aspect of operational inefficiencies in the design workflow to some extent and helped in reducing waste thereby helping the team to deliver at faster rate.

However the design work practices, unlike the development domain are more diverse and being the area with the most creative energy association in the whole lifecycle, the challenges to ensure the smooth amalgamation of the these design systems to the process blocks of the workflow was not easy. The fact is till the date writing this passage, it is still a challenge to fit the existing tools, to the design work-flows and then aligning it to the whole delivery track fuelled by the DevOps paradigm.

Recently the design team at AirBnB, came up with React Sketch App. Last year at RedHat UX team meet up Summit, as a part of a design challenge initiative I presented a concept Ditto, that was supposed to redefine the way the design can be integrated into a DevOpssupported environment. Will share the details of Ditto in coming articles of this series. ClearCleft also in recent times came up with Fractal that tried to reduce and even remove the distance between the design and development teams. Note that both the DevOps and DesOps are born out of similar drivers, however, the practices concerned with the two are very different.

From the example of Salesforce’s approach to design, the takeaway is the technological approach of use of “the single source of truth” can be a good starting point towards building a practical DesOps culture in the organisation. As the soul of DesOps based on the cultural shift and practices working towards Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery(CD), it makes sense to use the living design systems as the foundation of the overarching concept of DesOps.

To understand the overarching structure of DesOps, we need to explore the various dimensions that give the concept its shape. From a framework point of view, if we look at it, the typical 3 pillars of any framework also fits here —

1. Consistency — in the context of DesOps the consistency plays the major role both in approach and workflows as well as from the design perspective

2. Continuity — mostly it fuels the continuous design aspect that provides agility to the design process.

3. Complimentary – no doubt as DesOps completes the full-circle, it complements the vision of DevOps.

In the next article, we will dive into the different models associated with the DesOps framework.

DesOps : the Next Wave in Design (Part 3) The Maturity of Design Systems

To understand where a DesignSystem of an organisation stands in context of implementing a DesOps, first step is to evaluate the existing DesignSystem that is in place and contributes to the organisation’s design process. (We will explore the process aspect in details, in later articles in this series.) To evaluate any DesignSystems in a broadway we can easily form a metrics that takes care of the following two perspectives on the system.

Designer System Types

Typically the Design Systems can be broadly categorised into 3 types, namely: Static, Dynamic and Generative :

Static: Most of the attributes and elements that make this system is mostly static in nature. For example in a Static type Design System, the style guide may be pre-defined print ready reference, defining basic color standards and typography etc. The user has to read through and manually refer it to decide those related attributes in his work. This kind of System mainly prescribes guidelines, rules, principles which does not automatically change or created in a dynamic way either in the stages of creation or implementation by the developers etc. Typical organisational style guides, or UI pattern documentations where the system describes how and where to use the patterns with some sample code to refer are falling under this kind of categories.

Dynamic: This kind of DesignSystem have the content as well as the principles of implementations are designed and developed in a way that can be directly used in the code. The creation and implementation of the content are dynamic and mostly geared towards the actual elements that can directly be used in the code. This kind of DesignSystem is more than a reference system for the developer, rather as a part of the actual build of the actual products developed as a part of it. Most easily noticeable traits of this kind of DesignSystem is that some special purpose frameworks, code libraries are part of it, which integrate into the actual builds of the products.

Generative: Generative DesignSystem are the ones, which generate the actual build ready outputs that can directly go into the build of the product. For example, instead of a static style guide, a generative DesignSystem can have the tool that will generate dev-ready HTML, CSS and Java Script based output from the designer/developer inputs. The output of such system, take care of the context for which the design outputs is needed. Let’s say if the developer needs to build a cross platform hybrid app, hen such system can generate the code that will take care of the scenarios for the interaction and behaviour for all target device resolutions, screen density as well as the behaviour for native wrappers as well as in-browser functionalities and restrictions. We will again journey into the details of the Generative Design Systems shortly.

Designer System Maturity

The other angle to look at the Design Systems is to scale the maturity to measure how much the system has evolved. One of most important aspect of any Design System is to understand the maturity of it, as this helps to understand where it is in the overall DesOpsroadmap. Irrespective of the varied and complex categorisation of the same, we can still name the maturity as Low , Medium and High to get a quick and easy comprehension. And when we try to map the maturity, it takes care of the categorisation aspect.

Low Maturity: When the Design System has a low maturity, it mostly depends on the static attributes that we discussed above. The creation and maintenance of different attributes are mostly the result of manual effort and the most interesting point about this is that the designer and developers have the cognitive load to refer and comprehend and take decisions on what to use and not use in specific context of their work or product. It is also important, there may be some attributes which might have dynamic attributes , but most of them are out of the transition that the design system is having due to its evolution,

Medium Maturity: In the Design Systems with medium maturity, the most elements and attributes are mainly dynamic in nature. These systems mostly depend on the frameworks, libraries etc. There may be some overlaps in static and well as generative attributes.

High Maturity: Similarly in Higher maturity, apart from the fact that it mostly contains generative attributes, it involves the aspects of automation, computer-vision and may deploy artificial intelligence (AI) to provide continuous pipelines that aspires to remove the human intervention form the process blocks. On ground reality it might require the human intervention to feed in the creative juices or decision power that impacts critical human needs or contexts.

When we map these 2 perspectives horizontally and vertically, we get the the right insight into the DesignSystem’s position in the graph that allows us to clearly understand where the gaps are for the DesignSystem to evolve on which dimensions.

Note that the metrics that govern the success of a DesOps implementation is almost synonymous to this metrics we explored about Design Systems. The factors that adds to this metric on Design Systems, includes aspect where we measure how impactful the Design System is in touching the different design process lifecycle blocks where each role like an Information Architect or an Interaction Designer , Visual Designer or even the Developer are attached to, in the delivery track. This aspect is more figuratively termed as a Living Design System.

The Living Design System

The scaling of design is a classic issue. Moreover in recent times the explosive growth of technology across different devices, platforms and ecosystems, it became an ever-growing monster that every designer faces sooner or later. Native (Windows, Android, iOS, Linux etc. ) Web (HTML, HTML5, CSS, CSS3, JavaScript and frameworks etc. ) Along with the combination – the Hybrid – make the scaling of the design language an unending challenge.

The Salesforce design team tried to solve the challenges of applying similar designs across cross-platform product families by introducing a dynamically configurable design asset system which viewed the individual entities of any design system as design tokens.

Technically it was a single JSON file that was the “Single Source of Truth” that contained a set of name-value pairs that defined the properties and their relationships under different categories like text colours, backgrounds, border sizes, font sizes, etc. This JSON was consumed by the framework (i.e. The Lightning Designing System link: https://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/downloads/) developed and templatized for different target platforms, devices, Operating Systems etc. The Lightning Designing System framework generated different formatted outputs for CSS via common CSS preprocessors like Sass, Less and Stylus. Also there was an output in XML format that is supported in Android and JSON for iOS specific development. The Salesforce Design Tokens open-sourced at https://github.com/salesforce-ux/design-system.

The second interesting aspect of this was the use of GitHub to host the design system. Unlike the design system of traditional organisation, where the design system was hosted as downloadable form (even in the cases where the version control like Git is used) these have to be either translated into desired formats for the target platform or hosted especially along with the code. But here the design tokens representing the styles definition and the properties, as hosted on GitHub, were directly integrated into the build process contributing to the Continuous Integration and Development approach of development. In this sense, it was more as a Living System acting a single source of truth, from which the required branch is pulled and be made as a part of the build.

Many other pattern library and/design systems like RedHat’s PatternFlyhttp://www.patternfly.org is also available in similar approach at GitHub (i.e. at https://github.com/patternfly )as that of this second aspect we discussed now. But the idea of making the style guide being available as a SingleSource of truth in combination of this second aspect is what makes the case of the Salesforce design system unique among similar attempts for an approach to deliver a consistent design across different platforms.

DesOps : the Next Wave in Design (Part 2) The Design Systems

By definition, a Design System is a series of components that can be reused in different combinations to manage design at scale. In the context of software development lifecycle specific to digital products e.g. apps, applications and websites etc., the design system can contain design guidelines, visual style guidelines, assets, components, widget definitions, form controls, interaction paradigm definitions etc. at a different maturity level touching upon different roles starting from the interaction designer, visual designer to prototyper as well as the developer.

Many organizations have the pattern libraries clubbed with some best practices and guidelines used as a Design System for the organization and the community — for example is one such example is RedHat’s PatternFly. When you visit PatternFly website, you find it a typical design system that has different components including interaction paradigms, widgets, working code, visual style guides and assets touching upon many roles involved in the delivery thread. Similar is the case with lot other popular design systems. Among popular Design Systems as of today, most notable are: Google’s Material Design, BBC’s Gel, SalesForce’s Lightning, AirBnB’s Design Language , IBM’s NorthStar and so on.

To normalise practices and design patterns around a common visual language, style guides, pattern libraries, design systems play a critical role. Design systems can vary in maturity. With purpose, I have mentioned the case of “different maturity” — it means that the variations of the concept of the design system are already in place, and each of those variations has a slightly different efficiency to solve the common goal of designing at scale. at the bare minimum level, it can simply start with naming objects, colours, texts, components and conventions or even best practices. This can scale upto highest maturity level, where it can define finer details of the experience and even can end up in generative solutions in themselves — e.g. frameworks which may dynamically provide or define the experience details required for delivery.

Design Systems have been so popularised, they are arguably a default need of any product organisation of even limited scale. This usually becomes the very first push by an organisation to begin looking at their design operations with fresh eyes as introducing a design system brings with it a whole set of new problems that most digital product design organisations were previously ill-equipped to deal with on their own. The success of the implementation of a design system will ride on the support it gets operationally.

No doubt, Design Systems are a primary need for the organisation even on a limited scale and budget. However, the design systems mostly are developed within the operational vacuums. Have the best-designed components, but if you can’t create a workflow for their upkeep and deployment not just through your product offerings, but through your design production system itself, it will invariably cause more friction than the previous system did.

When you start with the pain point of a Design Systems, you are starting your operations with a solution to a specific problem. This lens answers the question — “How do we scale design quality through the enterprise?”

Why We Need Design Systems?

By nature, a Design System helps taking decisions faster and reduce wastage in delivery track. This thereby helps the designers to spend more time in defining workflows. Also as it helps to work in a fast track mode, it also promotes the designers in exploring multiple concepts in the same amount of time.

Having a Design System is to have a “single-source-of-truth”, which can be referred by all different roles including engineering, testing as well as designers throughout the delivery lifecycle. This helps in articulating as well as implementing consistency across different modules of the application or even in the product line. However to ensure the Design System acts as a “single-source-of-truth”, certain criteria need to be fulfilled — and this is also the crossroad where a Design System that acts as the “single-source-of-truth”, paves way for DesOps.

Design System as “Single-Source-of-Truth”

Let’s first understand what do we really mean when we refer Design System as “Single-Source-of-Truth”. In the enterprise, any design on the hindsight has one major alignment — i.e. to align itself to the business goals or the enterprise, which also drives the product strategy as well as the delivery and impacts a lot of associated aspects such as the delivery life cycle that includes the typical Design, Development and Quality tracks. In most of the cases the associated operational systems which are made up of processes, practises and tools are mostly development centric. The traditional SDLC models were designed more from a process perspective that had the bias towards development aspect of the delivery. So when a Design system is typically established in an organisation, the normal tendency is to create a Design System that fills the gap between these different entities and their associated process blocks. The Design System that touches all these associated entities and the process blocks in a way that helps in optimizing the delivery of the product or in improving the quality of it, by becoming the single driving force of design aspect (from the creative problem-solving aspect ), can be regarded as a “Single-Source-of-Truth”. But in reality, as the different roles like the Designer, Developers and Quality Assurance team members, each play within their boundary of age-old definition of processes. The tools, technologies as well as the processes used by them are so diverse and the workflow among them so disjointed that on the ground reality, that having a Design System as “Single-Source-of-Truth” has not been an easy thing to achieve.

Designer Tools vs Developer Tools

One of the key aspects is that in modern time with the use of Agile along with design-driven practices like Design Thinking and User Centred Design models, has tried to reduce the tilt toward the engineering, has certainly helped many organisation to be more effective in delivering products with the qualitative design. However, the Design System developed in many organisations by nature involves the set of tools and processes that suffer from such bias and the selection of tools and technology-driven workflows that are more developer-centric. For example, the tools like TextEdit or Notepad and the command line terminal windows are highly preferred by the developers. The workflows defined around such tools to make developers more productive and help them improve their craft which is coding. When the processes and tools by themselves are technology driven and developer driven, and when such system is integrated with the standard components of a design system like style guides, codes, widgets etc. , the generation and maintainability of such things by designer gets affected as they are from the different world with their own way of working with their own world of GUI driven tools starting from mind mapping to wireframing and creating visual assets. And this what brings the disjoint experiences to the design operations, thereby preventing to achieve a seamless full-circle of design-development operations. But the result of such design system is always like a patchwork that may not introduce the fundamental changes in the process to meet the goal of DesOps — most of which are centred around consistency, collaboration, continuous integration and continuous design. And to achieve this is actually a goal that aligns with the core vision of DesOps.

We will continue exploring the Design Systems in context with DesOps and touch upon topics like Design System maturity and Living Design System as well as the concept of generative systems, in the part -3 of this DesOps article series. So keep tuned in and do feel free to share the word!!!