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 โvoice 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 โas 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 โcut 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.