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Customer Experience

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    Rethinking our UI: How Easy Agile innovates for a better user experience

    At Easy Agile, we’re constantly looking for new ways to improve our products, and one of the ways we foster innovation is through Dash Days—a focused period where our team steps away from daily tasks to experiment, explore, and reimagine how our tools can better serve customers.

    During our most recent Dash Days, we took a fresh look at the user interface of two of our flagship products, Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs. The goal was to enhance interaction and discoverability, so users can experience the full value of our tools without unnecessary complexity.

    Here’s a glimpse into our thought process, challenges, and the exciting solutions we explored.

    The challenge

    As Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs have evolved, we’ve introduced powerful features designed to give users more control and flexibility. However, as new capabilities have been added, the interface has become more elaborate. For us, this presents an opportunity—an opportunity to take a step back, simplify the experience, and help users unlock more of what our products offer.

    To address this, we brought people from across the business together to brainstorm how we could improve the experience in both products. Through these sessions, we identified a few core opportunities:

    Key themes of opportunities to improve Easy Agile's user experience
    • Discoverability: How do we make it easier for users to find and use the powerful features built into our tools?
    • Visibility: What’s the best way to surface the right information and features when users need them? 
    • Consistency: How do we create a more uniform experience within and across our products to make navigation intuitive?

    Armed with these insights, we then set out to explore solutions tailored to each product’s unique challenges. 

    A more personalized experience with Easy Agile Programs

    For Programs, we focused on three “how might we” questions to reframe our challenges into opportunities: 

    1. How might we create more focus on the actions users are trying to complete?
    2. How might we make navigation more intuitive and easy?
    3. How might we help users with more context about where they are in the app at any given screen? 

    Out of the many solutions we explored, the one that got us the most excited was the idea of an Easy Agile Programs Home Screen—a personalized dashboard designed to guide users based on where they are in their planning cycle. 

    Conceptual sketch of a new home screen user interface for Easy Agile Programs
    Conceptual sketch of the Easy Agile Programs home screen

    This home screen could adapt based on where users are in their journey, offering relevant guidance and actions.

    • For new users, the home screen could provide clear onboarding steps and easy access to help, so they can get started quickly and confidently.
    • For experienced users, it could offer insights and key actions related to their progress, so they can stay focused on what matters most. Users might even see data summarizing their accomplishments, which makes it easier to share successes with their teams.

    Whether someone’s brand new to the product or deep into execution, the home screen could be a great way to guide and coach our users—helping them answer questions like, "What should I be doing next?" or "What extra value am I missing out on?". 

    A more focused interface for Easy Agile TeamRhythm

    For TeamRhythym, our three key “how might we” questions were:

    • How might we provide more focus within the User Story Map during sprint planning?
    • How might we improve the discoverability of issues without epics?
    • How might we enhance the layout to highlight key features and improve overall usability? 

    With these questions in mind, we explored a range of ideas to simplify sprint planning and make it easier for users to prep, plan, and review their work, whether they’re using Scrum or Kanban.

    Three-step process for effective sprint planning on Easy Agile TeamRhythm
    Three steps to simplify sprint planning on Easy Agile TeamRhythm

    Sprint planning can sometimes feel overwhelming when you have multiple sprints competing for attention. To help users focus, so we explored the idea of introducing a focused view during sprint planning

    • This would allow users to zoom in on a specific sprint and the backlog alone, while collapsing others. 
    • Each issue would have its own row in the detailed view, and users can drag and drop either an entire row or drag individual issues to quickly rank them based on priorities.
    • The sprint view will also hide epics that don’t have linked issues in the current sprint, giving users a cleaner view of what’s relevant to their current work.
    Conceptual UI of Easy Agile TeamRhythm User Story Map's focused view for sprint planning
    Conceptual UI of TeamRhythm User Story Map's focused view for sprint planning
    Conceptual UI of Easy Agile TeamRhythm User Story Map's detailed sprint view
    Conceptual UI of TeamRhythm User Story Map's detailed sprint view

    We also looked at ways to enhance the User Story Map interface to bring the most useful tools and features to the forefront. By improving how key functionality is presented, we’re helping teams quickly access what they need, when they need it, enabling them to stay productive without interruption.

    Conceptual UI of a more condensed top navigation for TeamRhythm User Story Map
    Conceptual UI of a more condensed top navigation for TeamRhythm User Story Map

    This way, we can create a smoother, more focused experience for teams using TeamRhythm, so they can focus on what’s in front of them without being distracted by everything else.

    Your turn. What do you think?

    At Easy Agile, we’re always thinking about what comes next. 

    These ideas aren’t on our official roadmap just yet, but they’re the kind of innovations we’re excited to explore.

    If you think these changes would improve your experience with Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs, let us know! Your feedback helps us decide what to prioritize, so we can continue building tools that truly make a difference for your teams.

    Photos of Easy Agile team working on Dash Days with "thank you!" on it