[IxDA Discuss] Introducing UX design in an agile environment

[Bruce Esrig]

I recently completed a project in which the development team was changing 
over to an Agile approach. We divided the problem space up into domains, 
each addressed by a solution team.

On this project, there were two roles to talk to: systems engineers and 
developers. The systems engineers seemed to think about a lot of the same 
issues that a user experience designer would, but from a systems point of 
view: what goes on each page ... to feed the needs of the system. The 
developers were very interested in getting enough specifics so they could 
go off and prototype.

The role of the user experience person was to perpetually raise the level 
of discussion. What does the user need most today? What is the user's goal? 
What do we need to engineer into the user's world view to best reflect that 
goal? What approximation to that can we easily add to the user interface, 
in a way that will permit us to continue to migrate towards the ideal later?

With that introduction, perhaps you would enjoy Leise Reichelt's slide deck 
from the IA Summit, which is available at
http://www.slideshare.net/leisa/waterfall-bad-washing-machine-good-where-does-ia-fit-in-the-design-process/

There are a few slides of background, and then you can see her main idea 
starting at slide 16. She shows a correspondence between some Agile 
approaches and some user experience techniques. The way I understand it, if 
the user experience person fits in well with the rapid-turnaround life 
cycle of an Agile methodology, the team will be happy to have the benefit 
of the guidance that personas and user stories can provide.

Best wishes,

Bruce Esrig

At 03:05 PM 5/1/2007, Dmitry Nekrasovski wrote:

>I've recently started a new role as the first UX designer in a company
>practicing an agile development process. I'm now working on an
>internal presentation to introduce UX principles within an agile
>context.
>
>So far, I've found a number of resources that aim to explain agile
>approaches to UX practitioners, but very little along the lines of
>explaining UX principles and practices to agile developers. Does
>anyone have any pointers they'd be willing to share?
>
>Dmitry