It is becoming more common for software to be created in cross-functional teams that combine concept, design and development. These teams use their knowledge of a range of areas and combine this with agile and lean working methods to lead their project towards success.
The following article analyzes exactly how agile and lean approaches impact user experience design.
Agile Product Development: The Approach
Agile development is based on two fundamental concepts:
Software is developed iteratively.
Each iteration becomes a kind of mini project that delivers a complete product increment. The increment is planned, designed, implemented, integrated and tested “in one” and the code for each increment complies with the final desired quality. Depending on the team, an iteration takes two to four weeks.
Software is developed collaboratively.
All team members - regardless of their roles - work together to design, implement and test the increment. The individual team members have less specialization than in classic project approaches: so Developers also actively test and work on the product’s specifications, for example.
To plan product increments, agile teams split up product functionality into “user stories” that can be used to create a product backlog. Each iteration is therefore the implementation of a user story from the product backlog.
Agile Development: Challenges for UX Designers
This agile concept was developed without any focus on user experience design. It is therefore usually difficult for UX Designers to integrate into agile teams. The following are the two most important reasons:
Different methods of working.
User Experience Designers usually design the user interface using user scenarios. These describe an application case from the user’s perspective and contain a different level of detail than user stories. In contrast, user stories don’t contain any application cases from the user’s perspective, rather describe a range of individual functions down to the smallest detail. Good user experience design cannot, however, be developed from separate user stories that don’t interact.
Different scheduling.
As iterations take around two to four weeks, the team is unable to effectively plan and carry out user research activities for the selected function. This alone could take up the whole timeframe for the iteration - if not considerably more - and so impact the planning and implementation period intended for the next increment.
Agile Development and UX: Solutions
Cross-functional teams can, of course, still work together agilely, as there are practicable solutions for both challenges:
