- Why Citizens Advice chose an agile development philosophy to develop their new CMS and inform their digital strategy
- How user testing has informed that development
- The lessons learnt – plus points and drawbacks
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Making Agile development and UX work at Citizens Advice
1. Making Agile development and UX work at Citizens Advice
Adrian Hunt, Publishing Manager, Citizens Advice
First time agile
2. What I am going to talk about
Why Citizens Advice chose an agile development philosophy to
develop their new CMS and inform their digital strategy
How user testing has informed that development
The lessons learnt – plus points and drawbacks
but first ...
4. This is a picture of the 1.8 million people
who attended Barack Obama’s first
inauguration as US President.
That’s roughly how many people
walk through our doors each year
Twice as many ring us
Nine times as many use our
websites
5. A well performing website but...
Citizens Advice’s advice website has seen traffic consistently
increase over the past five years. Last year was its most
successful ever with nearly 16 million unique visitors.
However it is built on a creaking,15-year-old CMS.
6. Vince Cable saves the day
In March 2013, Citizens Advice was awarded additional funding
to develop their online offering, some of which was allocated to a
new CMS, a refresh of our website design and the development
of a new digital strategy.
7. Scope of the project
Technical – Replacing a content management system and developing new
functionality
Data – Migrating the content of six existing websites
Information architecture – All sites on a single domain with some sites
merging
Design – Refreshing existing and introducing responsive design
Workflow – Changing the editorial model of intranet to include workflow
Commercial – Setting up a web subscription service for one of our websites
and ...
8. Agile project management
• Following disappointing experiences in previous ICT projects, we
decided to develop the new CMS using Agile principles. This
decision was made before any CMS had been chosen. It was an
experiment and the first time it had been adopted at Citizens
Advice.
• After a procurement exercise, the EPiServer CMS was chosen
with Sigma as the developer. One of the particularly convincing
arguments that Sigma had made was the emphasis they placed
on user experience and continual user testing within the
development cycle.
10. Agile against traditional development
Pros
Early visibility of developments
Changing priority of features easy
Changing order of releases
easy
Testing done throughout
Cons
Requires a lot of time
Almost dedicated input from
business owners
Lots of testing needed
11. Our Agile approach
Story – item/feature to develop
Backlog – prioritised list of items to develop
Sprint – 2 week mini development cycle taking top items from the backlog,
developing and testing them before presenting them
-
Showcase – Where developed stories are presented. They are then tested
against the specification
Each story costs a certain number of points
Each sprint contains a max of 120 pts = velocity
Intention: early and continuous visibility of development
13. Intended velocity
July August September October November December January February March
BMIS CABlink Adviceguide
BMIS
CABlink
Corp
Adviceguide
Advisernet
AdvisernetCorp
14. User experience approach
At the outset of the project, we had the goal to test new ideas,
designs and functionality with users and place each site in a beta
version prior to rollout…
Feedback was gathered through a variety of techniques, including:
Workshops and focus groups
Interviews, surveys and questionnaires
Natural environment observation
User testing (remote and observed, guerrilla)
Analytics
Website feedback mechanisms
15. Where UX counted
Benchmarking of existing sites
Template design
Paper prototyping
Strategic goals
Internal stakeholder requirements
Key external stakeholder requirements
Accessibility reviews at each site launch
Beta testing of the internal sites, BMIS and CABlink
200 Citizens Advice super testers recruited
Two focus groups representing the public and power
16. Agile and UX in action
My sketch of a section
start page with the
different types of feature
Agile and UX in action (idea generation)
17. First draft of the design of
the section start page in
Photoshop
Agile and UX in action (design 1)
18. Agreed design of the
section start page in
Photoshop
Agile and UX in action (iteration of design)
20. Testing of functionality
by Citizens Advice,
comments and findings
recorded on Trello
Agile and UX in action (staging)
21. Agile and UX in action (live)
The home page of one
of our intranet sites,
CABlink, which is built
from interchangeable
blocks developed for
the start pages of other
sites
22. Milestones: Where are we now
Sep 2013: Presentation to Annual Conference
Oct – Dec 2013: BMIS beta
Jan 2014: BMIS live
Feb – Mar 2014: CABlink beta
Apr 2014: CABlink live
Jun 2014: Last two development sprints planned
Early Sep 2014: AdviserNet launch planned
-
Mid Sep 2014: Corporate and Adviceguide sites merged and new
citizensadvice.org.uk launched
Autumn – Winter 2014: UX review of sites
23. Lessons: Agile
Exhausting – get the velocity right
Testing resource
Bugs – with complexity comes bugs
Specifications are still required
Tracking of progress essential
More stabilisation sprints
There is built-in redundancy
Co-location helpful, though not essential
24. Lessons: Project specific
Make sure you have real content in the CMS on which to develop
Know the technology – as the client you will be specifying and testing
Think design/templates and then develop functionality
More UX
Second staff full time
Was a shift-and-lift migration project suitable for agile development?
25. Successes
More client involvement in development
Don’t go too far wrong
Continuous redefinition / iteration
Constant reprioritisation of stories
Encourages you to test with users
You get better at it as the project progresses
Better product as an end result
26. The future
Agile is now being rolled out to other projects and areas of Citizens Advice
On the websites, we are adopting Agile and user needs wholesale as a
means of producing and reviewing content and tools
User experience is central to our future content strategy
Testing resource is recognised as an essential component to any
development
27. Thank you and questions
My name is Adrian Hunt.
I am Publishing Manager at Citizens
Advice.
I can be contacted at:
adrian.hunt@citizensadvice.org.uk
or
adrhunt@googlemail.com