Why traditional Agile doesn’t work for UX
The primary focus of Agile methodologies is the delivery of quality software
The primary focus of User Experience Design is the delivery of experiences
- Highly Creative- Works in Photoshop, Illustrator- Sits alone in their room- Perfectionist- Produces beautiful designs- Can become protective and defensive of their
work
The Superstar Designer can be the result of :
1. Shoehorning Design into Agile practices
2. Unmatched expectations in hiring - Graphic Design vs UX
- The UX is integrated into the Agile team
- Works one sprint ahead of dev
- But they have become a bottleneck
- Dev is frustrated by changing requirements
- UXer feels can’t do proper design
Solving the Beast-Feeder problem
Are design and development priorities aligned?
● Involve the whole team in designing the next iteration ● Pair designers with developers and include developers in design review and
collaborative design practices
● Living design guidelines
Solving the Beast-Feeder problem
Is designer doing “Just enough design”?
● Lo-Fi wireframes ● Conversations are often more valuable than deliverables ● Rapid prototyping● Discount User Testing methods
- Agile is fairly mature in the organisation
- Several cross-functional scrum teams with an embedded designer
- UXers are involved in Agile activities
- The do Just Enough Design
- Pair with Devs
- Share results of user testing with the team
“Basically it’s a process of structured brainstorming for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing new ideas with users throughout one to five days workshop”
The Google Design Sprints
Monday: Understand and defineTuesday: Divergent design activities. Wednesday: Decide on which ideas to go for. Create a StoryboardThursday: Prototype the storyboard. Friday: Validate. Test your prototype with users
Managing a growing UX team in Agile
- Good Cop/Bad Cop Design pairs- Design guilds- Design leadership- Storyboards VS Product Roadmaps- Design systems
Conclusion
- The organisation needs to buy into Agile and understand what UX is - UX is not Graphic Design- UX needs to be integrated into the Agile methodologies- Design needs to be iterative, but leave space to be creative as well- Design vision set in Design Spikes and Sprints- Evolve UX leadership- Lean UX or Agile UX
No silver bullet!