CanUX: UX Swimlanes

by November 17, 2008

At CanUX 2008 in Banff, Yvonne Shek described UX swimlane deliverables that help clients understand users, business needs and technology all at once.

ux swimlanes

  • UX swimlanes outline a bird’s eye view of a story, scenario, or component for sponsors, designers, businesses, and engineers.
  • Executive & sponsors: high level comic that illustrates the scenario
  • UX & creative team: flow through steps of a process
  • Business: fulfillment process and business logic
  • Technical team & architects: data systems, back-end technology
  • When to use swim lanes: really early in the project during discovery & strategy stage to get everyone on the same page
  • Helps to get buy-in on the scope of a key scenario or story from stakeholders
  • Focuses on what you are building and why are you building it. Outlines requirements for stakeholders and working team
  • How do we start making swim lanes: start with workshops to set scope (what’s in and what’s out)
  • Flows first: who is user what are their goals, etc.
  • Comics second, business and technical third and at the same time. Work with business analyst & technical team to fill them out.
  • Product manager swim lanes come last: uses cases & features/functions
  • Comics are cool but hard to do. Could use photos, sketches, etc instead.
  • Delivering comics with whole diagram helps bring executives on board. Comics alone may not support the stakeholders
  • Overview of swimlanes
  • Swimlanes example
  • More information & templates