YouAreHere: UX + Agile

Agile UX is Good, But Can Get Better

This year, we asked study participants how extensively UX was integrated into their projects and how satisfied they were working on projects with a particular development methodology. They indicated their answers on a 1–5 scale, with 5 indicating the highest level of integration or satisfaction:

Project Methodology	Integration of User Experience	Satisfaction with the Method
Waterfall	2.5	2.9
Agile	3.1	3.7
Iterative	3.2	3.8

Clearly, Agile is considerably better than the old Waterfall method.

Even good old Jakob Nielsen has done research about the combination of UX and Agile. This is becoming mainstream quickly!
According to their study the team members (ux people and developers) were very satisfied with the results:: both the level of integration of UX into the process as the satisfaction with the Agile method were very high compared to the Waterfall method.

If the agile and UEX communities are going to work together effectively, they need to find a middle ground.  I believe that middle ground exists, but that both communities need to adopt several changes in order to succeed.  First, agile professionals must:

• Learn UEX skills. .[...].
• Accept that usability is a critical quality factor.  [...]
• Adopt UI and usage style guidelines.  Developers must understand that not only should their code follow common guidelines, so should their UIs. 

 

Similarly, UEX practitioners must make some changes.  They need to:

• Go beyond UEX.  Agilists have mostly abandoning the concept of building teams of specialists and instead favor teams of generalizing specialists.  The implication is that although UEX practitioners bring a critical skillset to a development team, they still need to learn a wider range of skills to become truly effective.  [...]
• Become embedded in ASD teams. By embedding UEX practitioners on agile teams, not only will this increase the chance UEX issues are addressed, it will help to promote UEX skills within the agile community [...]
• Give ASD approaches a chance.  Kent Beck suggested to Alan Cooper that a week be invested at the beginning of a project to explore interaction issues, although Cooper believed that wasn’t sufficient.  The easiest way to find out who is right is to actually try it in practice.
• Start looking beyond XP.  [...] To address UEX concerns you will very likely find that you need to tailor some of the principles and practices of Agile Modeling and/or the techniques of User-Centered Design into your base software process.

 

Scott W Amber urges us to try the combination of UX design and agile and explains what needs to change on both ends of the spectrum to make it happen.

To tell a story, one of the applications I built early on, it's not sexy but we were designing an application that would receive stuff that came into the back door of a grocery store and my response to that was "Gosh I can't design an application that helps people receive stuff at the back of a grocery store without going there, I have to see what it looks like". And it wasn't just me, I had a team of developers and I said "Let's go down to the grocery store and let's see people receive stuff at the grocery store". And we went back and we sat with the guy that receives carrots at the back door of the grocery store, we saw what his life was like, we snapped a few pictures we talked we watched him do his work and we came back and received stuff at the grocery store. That is talking to users and that is what interaction design is it doesn't take going finding a specialist to do it, it takes doing it.

I guess I would say "Yes, you can find interaction designers" but I might suggest that it might be a mistake to say that this is a specialist role that we get into the team part time. This is a way we are, just like Agile is a way we are, it's not something you pull in when you need it, I will worry about users one day a week or a week a month and rest of the time I will focus on building things.

In this interview Jeff Patton shares his ideas about UX with the Agile developers community. He also talks about how he is writing a book (together with Alistair Cockburn). Although he says he "hates the writing process" I hope he does finish it so we can get his knowledge about doing User Centered Design inside Agile projects.

This presentation compares waterfall and Agile processes and the pro's and con's from a UX point of view. It also does some proposals for possible processes. The video of the talk can be viewed online as well.

Yesterday in the car I listened to this excellent podcast about practicing UX in an Agile environment. I learned that Jared Spool is a great interviewer with humor and personality. I also learned a lot about the subject from Jeff Patton who was being interviewed about the subject. Jeff gives many interesting tips and pointers to further reading.

Equally interesting is this more recent podcast about the same subject with the same interviewer and interviewee.

I keep following Jeff Patton's weblog.

Agile methods challenge UX professionals to be more flexible and adaptable, to work more closely with developers, and to have closer contact with a product’s users. They force UX designers to work more closely with other participants in the development process than traditional development methodologies do. This, in turn, places greater pressure on designers to understand the constraints all team members must operate within. Agile methods are not appropriate for all projects, but working in a more agile way can help UX professionals deal with changing requirements more flexibly.

This great article sees UX as a challenge but also bringing huge oppurtunities.

When developing software, regardless of your process, there will always be a way in which requirements are described and broken up in peaces. This allows developers to pick up these smaller pieces and work on a single feature at a time. When using the Unified Process (OpenUP/RUP) Use Cases describe the interaction between end users and the system to build in detail. Often these Use Cases are used to document software up front before development starts.

Agile methods like Scrum en XP favor User Stories. Short, simple descriptions of what a user wants to accomplish and why. These are a lot less formal and leave a lot of detail open for interpretation. The high level of interaction between the development team and the product owner and the frequent oppurtunity to change and refine should then make up for that.

In his article Scott Sehlhorst compares User Stories and Use cases side by side and comes to the valid conclusion that each have their place and that depending on your environment you can benefit from both techniques.