Comments on Agile + UX: six strategies for more agile user experience

Austin Govella — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:51:19 GMT

Brian,

I totally agree on our primary goal as UX practitioners. If I seemed casual, that’s only because I don’t think the UX is the most important part of working on a team. I think the most important part is working well together.

Every one on the team makes compromises. Working well means everyone understands the best compromises to make. That’s why the team’s design literacy is so important.

Brian Friesen — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:17:48 GMT

There are always ways to fit user experience design into any process. Will it be “good” design is another matter.

Several statements in this article trouble me and almost take a very “casual” attitude toward the resulting quality of the user experience. Agile was developed as a method of cranking out software quickly for the sake of monetary gain, NOT for the benefit of those who would ultimately have to use it.

Can “good” user experience design reside in an Agile process? Yes and no. It’s all about the end goal of developing the software in the first place. Is the world a perfect place in which products are developed for purely altruistic purposes? No. But user experience design and user centered design techniques were created to make software easier to use, NOT faster to develop.

“Fast” is not necessarily “good” when it comes to the end user experience. The user does not know or care if software dev takes 15 days or 15 months however, they DO care if the software sucks.

Statements like “bumping lower-priority items off the sprint” sound good but what usually happens is that what gets”bumped” ends up being careful research and design thought and application of that thought.

As the Agile process continues to grow in popularity we, as user experience designers will need to find ways to incorporate best practices into that process. Austin Govella has done a great job of doing so in this article, however, we must not lose sight of the basic goals of why there are user experience designers and the most important element of creating software in the first place….the end user.

Masood Nasser — Mon, 19 May 2008 04:16:09 GMT

Austin: My 2 cents: Want to be more agile. Run. I have taken a bluetooth device and talk about my product experience while running with my son Rayhaan. The voice gets captured in a recording device and then we use tools to convert it to text.

Thus while running our concepts are finalized and our health improves. How's this for agile buddy:). Your posts are improving by leaps and bounds. Will spend more time here! The only "rule" I have for my team is to workout once a day apart from the "be an angel "guideline".

cheers
http://masoodnasser.blogpsot.com
http://artinthemake.blogspot.com

Indi Young — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:54:14 GMT

This makes sense! I’m always being asked, “How do you do UX in an agile environment?” My answer is always “Take time to model your users first, then get settled into cyclic design.” You say this with #1 and #2 above. The other four points all make sense from a team standpoint, as well, and I’m glad to be able to point people to them. Also, since modeling can take a long time, I offer several recommendations: study one user segment at a time, sketch the model based on shared knowledge, then test it with some real field work, etc. More on step 2 here: www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models.