Agile + UX

Articles and writing on integrating agile development with user experience and product design

Agile + UX foundations

What’s wrong with Big Design Up Front (BDUF)?

Think big design upfront is the problem? It’s not. There's something else wrong with your organization. You can't build better products until you figure out what the real problem is.

Rewriting the Agile Manifesto

When we remove the kitten-words from the Agile Manifesto, we reveal the conflict between “the real” and “models of the real”, the tension between development and design.

Agile is built for teams

Remembering the team

Teams aren't rocket science. Differences in the way designers and engineers think are important, but they're not stopping you from succeeding. It's not the difference in process. It's not different goals. It's not the length of the sprint. When you phrase the problem as a team problem, and not a UX problem, it's obvious how you can better integrate UX.

A tale of three teams

One sprint, two products, three teams, and three different ways to integrate UX. It may have looked different, but the UX process was really the same.

Agile and UX working together

Making agile development and design work

Agile development won’t give you better design. Design models things to be made. Development makes things you’ve modeled. Agile development methods promise better model-making, but don’t promise better models. Agile development can actually devastate design.

Six strategies for more agile UX

There’s a secret lie lurking behind agile methods. ‘Agile’ suggests fast. Scrum throws around terms like “team velocity”, and agile literature seems to promise better, faster. It’s no wonder that when organizations hear this, all they hear is faster.

Parallel workstreams

Like anything, agile works or doesn’t work based on the people you have, and the culture they function in. (Everyone can now say one giant, collective “duh”.) Regardless of whether it does or doesn’t work for you, I’ve noticed most environments require parallel work streams.

(un)synchronizing UX and development

Keeping UX and development in synch assumes engineering and design are the same kind of work. This isn’t true. Holistic, contextualized user experiences require time to frame and synthesize the experience. This synthesis happens long before you can start coding features.

Healthy UX, not lean

Deliverables are not the problem. User experience practitioners are not in the deliverables business. We’re in the business of finding and evaluating problems and solutions.