Design Playground in Agile/Lean Environments?

Hey ??, I'm Nabil, a Product Designer passionate about user experience. Here, I'll share my thoughts, learnings, and interesting findings in design and UX.

Why am I doing this?

I aim to track how my views on design evolve and see how they change over time. Sharing my ideas publicly lets me hear different opinions, which helps me challenge my thinking.

Have you ever seen those memes about designers who create concepts that are practically very far from what could be built for the next Sprint or the MVP?

Have you ever struggled with this ?

I did.. and I'll walk you through a WIP solution I found.

In this issue

In this issue, I’ll talk about how we tried to balance designing for the next sprint & doing concept designs that focus on the larger picture.

The thing is when you work in a very fast lean environment, you are very focused on shipping stuff, I bit your day-to-day looks something like this :

• Focusing on specific tasks/problems.
• Using a design system or UI library to guide your work.
• Regularly making small, incremental updates.
• Adjusting existing patterns slightly to accommodate new ideas.

While this approach is efficient and saves time in the short term, it can lead to :

?? Start focusing on your small piece of design rather than the bigger picture.

We should aim to focus on the entire design symphony, not just on individual note.

Your question right now is definitely :

Okay, So what should we do about this?

I’ve been experimenting with this thing we called “Design Playground“ at Sobrus , I’m pretty sure there is something similar to this out there because we all share the same pain hhhh.

I’ll share with you a : WIP of how we did that, What we learned, and how I think it should be improved.

The Approach (WIP)

This is how a designer at Sobrus would start working on the playground :

→ Spotting the problem

Either in a specific product or in the connection between products ( Sobrus Ecosystem ).

A problem can be spotted either during :

?? User inquiry session.

?? Brainstorming session.

?? Something that we’ve been carrying with us because of the no-time excuse ( I don’t know if there is something in a product like this but a similar thing in dev is tech debt )

?? Tips :
- We save this in Notion issues with a “Ready for Design”
status and a “Design Playground” tag.

- We use a separate Figma file, not connected with
our Design system Library
( Designer is free to dream ;) )        

→ Exploring Ideas, Solutions, Layouts…

Then comes the fun part, here each designer is free to work with his approach, Here is what I used to do :

• I take the screen/flow I want to work on
• Screenshot the issue from linear or write it down in Figma
• Start by organizing my ideas in the text (Sometimes I use a pen and paper)

• Then I start exploring UI components, and different layouts in this step I like to start from a white frame and build stuff from scratch.

→ Getting Feedback and explore more…

For feedback we either test stuff internally or we have 30-minute meetings to give each other feedback on designs, sometimes a PM is included.

The goal here is to have an external eye on your explorations and to challenge your ideas too, see if you missed any states and if there are any edge cases.

?? Tip :
We take notes of what we discuss in Figma comments        

This stage often ends with a validation meeting with the PM, where we check this :

• Why should we include this in our Roadmap?
• What’s the priority
• How can we MVP it if it’s a big change?

Or it’s a No-Go and we all agreed on the Why and what’s the alternative to solve that problem.

→ Adding specs and making the designs Ready for Dev.

In case we decide to Go with the design, the designer adds the specs, and details for the dev so this can be added in the roadmap.

Mistakes, Learnings, and Improvements

???We did not define a specific time for each stage and the whole Playground thing ( having deadlines )

???We did not test with users.

???We had a lot of feedback meetings, We did not define the “Ready”

???We did not include the PM in all the steps, this made it hard to sell the idea later.

??We end up with amazing designs, influenced by Research, problem understanding, and the feedback loop we set up.

??Boosting Designer's creativity.

??More innovation vs less re-using old designs for different contexts and cases.

??This method helps to scale the design system.

?? Nice Finds

This method is cool, if you want to try this here are some tools that can help you :

• Mobbin for inspiration : https://mobbin.com
• Visual Audits: https://uxdesign.cc/building-wheels-the-importance-of-visual-audits-4e81aed38b8f
• Simplify the decision-making in your meeting with your PM: https://untools.co/decision-making

Thanks for reading ;)