User-Centered Agile Method

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The takeaway from this finding is that if your organization just recently adopted Agile, you should a expect some teething pains, and b not let these early problems discourage you, because success may well lie ahead after a few more years of organizational learning. The increase in UX investment shows that more organizations see user experience as important for business. The average team size is 10 and includes about two UX professionals. Note, the respondents in our study mostly comprise of people who attended the UX Conference and work in organizations that support UX training.

The actual ratio for Agile teams in general might be lower.

Keep in mind however, that having more UX professionals does not automatically guarantee success. Corporate Agile UX maturity levels along with other factors such as company culture and structure can impact success. People who are happy with their work environment report working in organizations who support a healthy, collaborative culture with clear roles and responsibilities. Everyone on the team including developers and stakeholders have a responsibility to produce useful, quality products.

The trend is increasing for UX professionals to work closely with product managers , to discuss strategy, and prioritize work. UX can provide useful data to inform the direction of projects and help teams maintain a coherent vision of the bigger user interface architecture. Similar to the earlier years, many UX Agile teams reported still preferring to conduct UX activities ahead of development sprints. The big difference now, however, is that mature teams have better-choreographed processes for collaboration and hand-off points.

There is clarity in roles and responsibilities. Members know what is expected and what falls within their realm of influence. Our respondents reported that UX practitioners involved in highly effective projects apply research and design-thinking techniques to inform product design, and lead activities that foster team cohesion and collaboration. They conduct both generative and evaluative research to identify feature gaps and examine both long-term and short-term solutions.

Rather than just waiting for feature requests to come from product managers and stakeholders, UX people proactively reach out to end users, discovering opportunities for their products to fill unmet user needs and stand out in crowded markets. Some of the respondents involved in highly effective projects shared that their teams have a formalized process for approving user stories to minimize disruptive requests from management or outsiders who swoop in without proper context or knowledge of the situation.

Appropriate training of new hires ensures that employees company-wide including management and stakeholders are familiar with established rules and abide by them. While Agile UX teams experience greater levels of success today than 7 years ago, UX influence still has room to grow.

How UCD Changes The Design Process And Customer Behavior

On average, practitioners scored UX influence on their Agile projects only 4. The Agile method was originally conceived as a method for programmers to improve their implementation practices. Software projects obviously rely on more skillsets than purely programming, and software success is not just a matter of implementation, but also depends on design.

Such broader understanding takes some time to be reflected in process practices, but is happening. In modern software-development environments, UX helps define how products and services are developed. As such, the role of UX has expanded to leadership and communication. Effective UX practitioners are proactive and involve team members in UX-related activities early.

They translate user needs into business needs, and communicate them convincingly to stakeholders. Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Email. We then divide the work that is necessary to deliver a Minimum Viable Product MVP into sprints and provide a quote for each sprint.

UCD research often informs this process. From the very outset, we know the type and number of resources each sprint requires, so in essence, the client is hiring a team. For larger and more technical projects, we recommend a four-week sprint.

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We start with a week of production—that is, UX design and coding. A third week of client user acceptance testing UAT then follows, which includes a backlog-planning meeting for the next sprint. The fourth week starts with a show-and-tell meeting, followed by the deployment of the code, or delivering design. There is also a final retrospective meeting at the end of that week, highlighting what went well and what we can improve on during the next sprint.

So what does it mean to deliver design during a sprint, and how can this work for UCD deliverables? We can bundle research-oriented UCD efforts that we can accomplish within one week—such as persona research, wireframes, interviews, usability testing, and ethnography—into a story; assign points , or levels of effort, to them; and prioritize the stories within the backlog. To maximize the collaborative potential, you must create a multidisciplinary team comprising natural team players who are flexible and, ideally, are co-located.

All of these team members bring their own strengths and expertise to the table. From the very outset, the team should have all of the expertise that is necessary to deliver the project—from UX researchers, UX designers, and developers to product owners and quality-assurance engineers. This not only improves efficiency, but also maximizes collaboration and helps the team to maintain a commitment to the original project vision.

So, for instance, developers should be involved in design and usability testing, ensuring that the design takes into consideration the realities and constraints of development.

Agile Success

Similarly, UX designers should work with developers on implementation to ensure that user needs drive development. Scrum masters, or project managers, are necessary to help run the project. We recommend having people in these roles on both the agency and the client side. Among other things, they oversee a risk register and help mitigate risks accordingly. When combining agile and UCD approaches, we find it best to start with a user-focused research sprint, which we often refer to as sprint zero —unless the client already has a relevant brand and solid user-centric research.

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Unlike other sprints, for which software is the output, the purpose of sprint zero is to define the user experience requirements and, if necessary, design a new brand and preliminary style guides and marketing messaging. Doing typical user, stakeholder, and market-based UCD research during sprint zero ensures that all requirements are evidence based.

The team also produces branding assets, when necessary, that they can use to help propel future sprints. For us, sprint zero usually includes a series of high-level epics, comprising bundled stories or spikes—research-driven stories or tasks—to which we allocate effort points. In all other aspects, we manage sprint zero just like any other sprint, with a cross-functional, collaborative team coming together for daily standup meetings to resolve any issues and keeping very open lines of communication with the client stakeholders.

This may mean conducting usability testing with fewer participants, testing low-fidelity mockups, or streamlining some planning processes.



Nielsen Norman refers to these as discount usability methods. Again, all team members should be involved in deciding on the output of each UCD activity and translating insights into realistic, actionable tasks. To keep a record of deliverables and decisions, we use high-level documentation that is concise and actionable. Examples include creating visual presentations instead of lengthy documents or providing light-weight summaries of research insights and a list of the resulting actions.

Whenever possible, we also use tools such as Basecamp that provide integrated revision control and collaborative features that save more time.