Shift left: a testing mindset to apply in UX process
Yann-Loup PHAN VAN SONG
General Manager and Chief Operating Officer | ex-Amadeus ?? | husband and dad ????????
Summary:?In that story, I expose how the Shift Left approach from the quality assurance (QA) can be applied to the user experience (UX) processes to increase efficiency.
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The shift left is a concept coming from the test strategy and the QA.
It is strongly linked to the concept of the test pyramid.
When I was managing QA engineers we initiated?a?challenging project to transform our test strategy. At the time our release cycle was pretty long and one main reason was the volume of manual tests. Our QA was spending most of their time running the same test scenarii over and over.
Doing tests earlier in the life cycle allows us to fix issues at a lower cost. Earlier automated tests (unit tests) are cheaper to maintain than end2end UI automated tests. The test pyramid recommends to have a base with more unit tests than the higher layers.
There is a lot of reading about QA, shift left and testing pyramid. Regarding UX and shift left less so… I just found one?article by Caitlin Geier?about this, while writing that story and it focuses on accessibility design. From that, her company has a page about the?Shift Left Accessibility Testing.
My view is that the QA added value is on defining the test strategy, defining the test plan, not running the test. Of course tests still need to be run, but without a proper test plan their value is limited.
The result of our transformation project: our releasing time was reduced from 11 weeks to 5 weeks!!! Independently to open the path to CI/CD (this deserves it owns story), you can guess its value in terms of return on investment (ROI) and work added value.
Now that I am managing UX specialists, I see a strong analogy with UX and QA. Shift left mindset is also very relevant for the UX processes and it is totally in line with Design Thinking and the double diamond.
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Doing high fidelity mock-ups is more costly than low fidelity, wireframe or zoning. And iterating a less detailed mock-up will be less effort.
In fact, each level of precision allows the stakeholders to focus on a specific kind of review.
At the beginning of a project we do not want feedback on the color of a panel but on the structure of the information. And doing mock-ups that look high-fidelity (even if they are not) does not help collecting relevant feedback.
Moreover, even before designing zoning and wireframe, we need to have the proper UX strategy and vision and to do that we need to know our users, who they are, what they want and what they do. Without that, our mock-up might be less valuable as we are based on assumptions instead of facts.
Finally, everything is about value and efficiency, in other words: ROI, Frank Spillers’?article on the ROI of UX?raises similar arguments than the shift-left approach. In particular, the earlier it is in the process, the higher ROI we get.
So for me, UX should also shift left.
Shift left from high fidelity to a lower fidelity design proposal to collect feedback on the correct level of information and be more efficient (as the test pyramid for QA).
Shift left from design to research to properly know the users and have a valuable UX strategy (as the test strategy and the test plan for QA).
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Visible at https://ylpvs.medium.com.
Originally published at?https://ylpvs.tech.blog?on August 31, 2021.
General Manager and Chief Operating Officer | ex-Amadeus ?? | husband and dad ????????
3 年And thank you Cathie Marache-Francisco for sharing Frank S.'s infographic on the ROI of UX!!