Agile teams are more proficient in executing the development process, but the compressed timescale forces some to abandon user research and degrade the resulting user experience.
Design charrettes inspire design sketches and ideas, include more people in the design process, explore and expose goals and objectives of colleagues in multiple functional roles, and drive off designer’s block.
Agile projects aren't yet fully user-driven, but new research shows that developers are actually more bullish on key user experience issues than UX people themselves.
Simple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristic evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design.
Agile methods aim to overcome usability barriers in traditional development, but pose new threats to user experience quality. By modifying Agile approaches, however, many companies have realized the benefits without the pain.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
