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

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss how to integrate UX practices with a continuous-delivery approach. First, our expert panel considers the company’s goal: continuous delivery or delivering meaningful outcomes? They then discuss how advances in DesignOps can help in this situation. Finally, our experts provide several tips on working within a continuous-delivery pipeline.

Every month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: [email protected]. Read More