Process: Agile Development

Agile development and UX design are like a couple in an arranged marriage—a relationship between two strangers who are expected to coexist, develop trust and respect, and eventually, love each other. Throw UX research into the mix and you have the makings of an even more awkward alliance, as you can see in this typical conversation between a UX designer and a product owner, somewhere in the middle of Sprint 0:

“I get very uncomfortable when someone makes a design decision without customer contact.”—Dan Ritzenthaler, Senior Product Designer at HubSpot

UX research is vital to creating design solutions for physical products and digital applications that meet the needs of users. UX research should be a well-organized, step-by-step process that lets you understand your target users and feeds realistic contexts and concepts into your product designs. Cognitive bias is an ever-present factor in all human beings that we must overcome to produce optimal design solutions.

UX professionals have adopted many methods of research that include qualitative and quantitative methods. It is highly recommended that UX researchers know about human psychology—the most evident reason being the need to understand behavioral patterns, cognitive loads, and mental models and the ability to identify users’ needs, goals, and frustrations. UX architects provide strategic inputs to designers, enabling them to implement laws relating to the presentation of information to users. Read More

Many say that UX design processes do not fit well into the agile methodology. As a UX designer who has experience working on both waterfall and agile projects—and many variants in between—I object to this assertion.

The Agile Manifesto outlines twelve principles that guide the agile methodology. One by one, I’ll explain how each of these principles not only fails to conflict with good UX design practice, but can even improve it. Read More