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UX leadership insight #8: UX and agile
(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)
Agile software methodologies were developed for creating small software applications for company internal use. The process was intended for small software teams. Most certainly, no user experience folks were involved. Anyway, software developer is UI designer’s best friend. If agile makes them perform and feel better, it is good for UI design too. Agile is just very, very different to the traditional UI design process.
Design process itself is agile. I doubt that there are any interaction or visual designs that were designed with a pure waterfall model. In any challenging design task, when you start to draft solutions, you soon understand if the original design intent that you are aiming at is correct after all. The iterative nature of detailed UX design, with prototyping and evaluations interleaved, bears similarities with agile.
My experience in embedding UX design in agile is that although some parts of the process are not completely compatible (for example, I strongly recommend fixing the basic concept before development sprints start), there are so many benefits in agile that I am a true supporter of this approach. Designers must be integral part of the sprint teams. In that way, they participate sprint planning, scrum meetings etc so they can every day keep track what happens with the implementation. Usually designs need to be iterated during the implementation – nobody can design pixel perfect stuff in one go – so optimizing the UI and SW together can improve the quality while the code is being written rather than with fixes afterwards.
Designers often don’t understand all the possibilities of the modern SW engineering tools, ready-made components , etc. While working with coders, the designers can learn that designs they thought would be difficult to implement may actually be quite easy. And designers don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. The best design ideas might come from SW guys too.
Close collaboration helps developers share the feeling of ownership of the designs. They want to implement something really good rather than just what has been specified. UX designers should learn to appreciate their best friends much, much more.
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I agree that UX design is iterative by its nature. Therefore Agile doesn’t feel so different to UX practitioners. But I do think that it takes a few (maybe even 10) years to get agile thinking and doing in par with waterfall model of software development.
Agile software development is also best suited for large projects that have a great level of uncertainty in their plans and/or environment.
In the meanwhile I still support the idea of building a strong UI vision before the software development starts. You should not start coding before the UX guy has completed a somekind of UI vision statement. It doesn’t always mean a psd-file of the interface components, but without somekind of UI vision statement (or a prototype) you end up re-coding a lot of stuff afterwards.
And agile software development doesn’t change the fact that restructuring software code is difficult and takes time and often makes the codebase more unstable. Agile software development just accepts this fact of life more easily and tries to cope with it.
And since UI design changes often require major rethinking on code level it is reasonable atleast to try to minimize the iteration work. Therefore it is not a bad idea to still push prototyping and UI vision work before the software development team is hired.
The major statement concerning UX and agile software development is that UX design should continue being a core part of the software development phase. And I agree what you stated about that phase in your article.