How agile product teams can adopt a UX centric approach

Customer experience, user experience and service design are a confluence of new disciplines that weren’t around when agile first appeared, explaining some of the difficulties we see in agile teams today.

Adopting a UX centric approach to agile product development can be tricky to get right, however, you can improve your chances of success by following a few best practice guidelines.

These include:

  • UX designers become the โ€˜voice of the customerโ€™ and design entire, end-to-end user experiences.
  • User research and focus group sessions, conducted periodically, inform the product roadmap.
  • Wireframes and high-fidelity UX collateral become the defacto requirements developers work from.
  • Your typical โ€˜as a, I want, so thatโ€™ user story no longer appears in the development backlog.
  • The technical team assesses the feasibility of each design, including the required backend capabilities.
  • Finished journeys are โ€˜cut upโ€™ into frontend and backend stories and added to the backlog for development.
  • Close coordination ensures backend development is ready for integration with frontend screens at the right time.
  • Direct user feedback follows each new product launch, often infrequently, say every three to six months.

The presentation, High Fidelity Agile, explains how to take a UX centric approach to agile product development in more detail, and you are welcome to use it in your own work.

Woking, Surrey, GU22, United Kingdom