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Agile Articles & Videos

  • UX Debt

    Understand the four critical activities that design teams should be focusing on when it comes to UX debt.

  • Observe, Test, Iterate, and Learn (Don Norman)

    There isn’t a next time in product development. You must always study to keep up with the product cycle.

  • UX Debt: How to Identify, Prioritize, and Resolve

    Like tech debt, UX debt piles up over time and, if left unaddressed, leads to compounding user problems and costly cleanup efforts. Agile teams can modify their processes to track and resolve UX debt.

  • Collaborative Agile Activities Reduce Silos and Align Perspectives

    All members of an Agile team, regardless of design skills, can contribute to the design of a product or feature during the development process.

  • Why Is UX so Difficult?

    UX practitioners who feel inept at their job usually face far greater challenges than improving their design, craft or research prowess. Rather, addressing development schedules, Agile, Scrum, Lean, and team member’s roles can create the greatest challenges.

  • Clarifying the UX Role for Your Team

    Tips to help clarify the role of UX and how to navigate the relationship dynamics between UX and the rest of the team within an Agile development process.

  • How to Do User Research Within Constraints

    There will always be constraints that we have to work in, whether it's not having enough time or not having dedicated researchers on our UX projects. This video offers tips on how to do user research without feeling stuck.

  • Retain UX Talent by Tracking UX Capacity

    Tracking UX capacity on Agile projects allows you to negotiate UX commitments in terms stakeholders understand.

  • Attributes of Effective Agile UX

    Agile is not easy for UX. However, blending Agile and UX can work with the right culture and mindset.

  • Handle Bad UX Requests Without Saying No

    UX professionals often receive poorly defined design requests. When saying no is not an option, a more productive way of addressing the request is to focus on the outcome goals and the Return On Investment (ROI) of proper UX effort.

  • Agile Is not Easy for UX: (How to) Deal with It

    Agile and UX work well together when management values UX, UX practitioners show leadership, the process isn’t strict, and UX is embedded on teams.

  • Bringing Personas to Agile

    Kim discusses ways to fit personas in Agile environments.

  • Does Agile Destroy UX?

    As Agile UX evolves, so does the role of the UX practitioner. In modern software-development environments, UX helps define how products are developed.

  • Accounting for UX Work with User Stories in Agile Projects

    To make UX activities visible, break user stories into UX and development subtasks, add UX to Kanban boards, and include UX acceptance criteria and story points.

  • The State of UX Agile Development

    New research shows UX making strides in infusing user-centered design approaches into Agile development processes.

  • UX Prototypes: Low Fidelity vs. High Fidelity

    No matter which prototyping tools you use, the same tips apply to preparing a user interface prototype for the most effective user research.

  • Top 10 Tips for UX Success From Agile Practitioners

    125 practitioners share their experience and success stories for improving user experience in Agile projects.

  • Front-End Style-Guides: Definition, Requirements, Component Checklist

    Front-end style guides help efficient design and testing, and enforce UI consistency. We present 8 style-guide requirements and 25 common components.

  • How Iterative Testing Decreased Support Calls By 70% on Mozilla's Support Website

    User research with data mining and paper prototyping quickly led to measurable success for one of the busiest support websites in the world.

  • UX Without User Research Is Not UX

    UX teams are responsible for creating desirable experiences for users. Yet many organizations fail to include users in the development process. Without customer input, organizations risk creating interfaces that fail.

  • UX Research Made Agile

    Test early and often is a key recommendation for UX research. Dora Brune shares her approach, including regular Open Test Labs to engage more product teams and make user research more agile. Kinder Eggs make for a nice warmup task, even in remote tests. (Recorded at a participant panel at the UX Conference.)

  • Separate UX Backlogs in Agile

    Agile development teams that struggle to keep track of UX work in the product backlog can utilize a separate backlog for UX. This method can help siloed teams where UX and development aren't in direct communication. Separate UX backlogs do have pros and cons, which are discussed here.

  • Starting a New UX Project

    At the beginning of a new project, identify the level of UX effort needed, and the key deliverables you aim to produce. Identify known and missing knowledge about users and tasks to uncover gaps before they bite you.

  • UX in Scrum

    UX professionals should engage in all Scrum ceremonies. Here are tips for what UX should contribute to stand-ups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint review, and retrospectives.

  • Content Creation in Agile Development Processes

    Many best practices for high-quality content creation and management will inevitably be skipped over, unless they are explicitly planned for as user stories within any Agile development project.

  • The Changing Role of the Designer: Practical Human-Centered Design

    Human-centered design has 4 principles: understand the problem, the people, and the system, and do iterative design. But what if you don't have time to do all 4 steps?

  • Retrospectives 102: The Sailboat Method

    After each sprint, the team should have a retrospective session to identify what went well or not so well. The sailboat metaphor is a nice way to structure such retrospectives.

  • Design Thinking and Agile

    The design thinking project life-cycle has 6 well-defined stages. Mapping these stages onto a typical Agile development project shows when designers should conduct which UX activities.

  • Assumptions: How to Track Them in the UX Design Process

    The best user experiences are backed by research, but sometimes we move more quickly than our research does. How can we best use and track assumptions as we go through design iterations?

  • Why MVP Is the Antithesis of Good UX

    Pursuing a "minimum viable product" (MVP) as a design strategy may work for startups, but usually leads to poorly integrated user experience for established design team working in traditional product categories.

  • How to Run a Retrospective for a Design Team

    Retrospectives are a dedicated time to come together, reflect, and collaboratively improve your design team’s process. In this video, we'll walk through the four components of a retrospective and how to use this meeting effectively.

  • UX Debt

    Understand the four critical activities that design teams should be focusing on when it comes to UX debt.

  • Observe, Test, Iterate, and Learn (Don Norman)

    There isn’t a next time in product development. You must always study to keep up with the product cycle.

  • Why Is UX so Difficult?

    UX practitioners who feel inept at their job usually face far greater challenges than improving their design, craft or research prowess. Rather, addressing development schedules, Agile, Scrum, Lean, and team member’s roles can create the greatest challenges.

  • Clarifying the UX Role for Your Team

    Tips to help clarify the role of UX and how to navigate the relationship dynamics between UX and the rest of the team within an Agile development process.

  • How to Do User Research Within Constraints

    There will always be constraints that we have to work in, whether it's not having enough time or not having dedicated researchers on our UX projects. This video offers tips on how to do user research without feeling stuck.

  • Attributes of Effective Agile UX

    Agile is not easy for UX. However, blending Agile and UX can work with the right culture and mindset.

  • Handle Bad UX Requests Without Saying No

    UX professionals often receive poorly defined design requests. When saying no is not an option, a more productive way of addressing the request is to focus on the outcome goals and the Return On Investment (ROI) of proper UX effort.

  • Bringing Personas to Agile

    Kim discusses ways to fit personas in Agile environments.

  • Does Agile Destroy UX?

    As Agile UX evolves, so does the role of the UX practitioner. In modern software-development environments, UX helps define how products are developed.

  • Accounting for User Research in Agile

    Along with design and development work, research efforts need to be represented in an Agile backlog to enable teams to focus on continuously learning about users throughout the project.

  • Lean UX Documentation for Tracking and Communicating in Agile

    Succinctly documenting the right details in key places helps Agile teams avoid information overload. When UX documentation is skipped or disorganized, teams waste time trying to find or remember information instead of improving the product.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2021: What Makes Them Great

    The 2021 Intranet Design Annual winning teams exhibited a capacity to swiftly pivot, as well as compassion and empathy for employees.

  • Mapping User Stories in Agile

    User-story maps help Agile teams define what to build and maintain visibility for how it all fits together. They enable user-centered conversations, collaboration, and feature prioritization to align and guide iterative product development.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2020: What Makes Them Great

    Clear vision, Agile development, and the goal to connect coworkers are what distinguishes the best intranets.

  • Tracking Research Questions, Assumptions, and Facts in Agile

    User-related questions and assumptions are not tracked throughout a product’s lifecycle, causing misalignment and overconfidence. Documenting these questions and assumptions in a knowledge board differentiates them from real facts.

  • Incorporating UX Work into Your Agile Backlog

    Three different backlog models enable teams to keep track of UX work in their Agile processes. Each model comes with pros and cons.

  • UX Responsibilities in Scrum Ceremonies

    As part of an Agile team, UX professionals should participate in all Scrum ceremonies in order to maintain open communication, influence product success, and productively contribute to the team.

  • UX Retrospectives 101

    Retrospectives allow design teams to reflect on their work process and discuss what went well and what needs to be improved. These learnings can be translated into an action plan for future work.

  • UX Debt: How to Identify, Prioritize, and Resolve

    Like tech debt, UX debt piles up over time and, if left unaddressed, leads to compounding user problems and costly cleanup efforts. Agile teams can modify their processes to track and resolve UX debt.

  • Collaborative Agile Activities Reduce Silos and Align Perspectives

    All members of an Agile team, regardless of design skills, can contribute to the design of a product or feature during the development process.

  • Retain UX Talent by Tracking UX Capacity

    Tracking UX capacity on Agile projects allows you to negotiate UX commitments in terms stakeholders understand.

  • Agile Is not Easy for UX: (How to) Deal with It

    Agile and UX work well together when management values UX, UX practitioners show leadership, the process isn’t strict, and UX is embedded on teams.

  • Accounting for UX Work with User Stories in Agile Projects

    To make UX activities visible, break user stories into UX and development subtasks, add UX to Kanban boards, and include UX acceptance criteria and story points.

  • The State of UX Agile Development

    New research shows UX making strides in infusing user-centered design approaches into Agile development processes.

  • UX Prototypes: Low Fidelity vs. High Fidelity

    No matter which prototyping tools you use, the same tips apply to preparing a user interface prototype for the most effective user research.

  • Top 10 Tips for UX Success From Agile Practitioners

    125 practitioners share their experience and success stories for improving user experience in Agile projects.

  • Front-End Style-Guides: Definition, Requirements, Component Checklist

    Front-end style guides help efficient design and testing, and enforce UI consistency. We present 8 style-guide requirements and 25 common components.

  • How Iterative Testing Decreased Support Calls By 70% on Mozilla's Support Website

    User research with data mining and paper prototyping quickly led to measurable success for one of the busiest support websites in the world.

  • UX Without User Research Is Not UX

    UX teams are responsible for creating desirable experiences for users. Yet many organizations fail to include users in the development process. Without customer input, organizations risk creating interfaces that fail.