UX and Agile
User Experience (UX) is becoming increasingly popular as that of Agile. But it’s really challenging for UX designers to fit design changes in Agile environment. Don’t you think so?
It’s not about the mentality of UX designers but there are so many constraints in agile which really makes their job challenging.
Before that, first we need to understand something about UX.
What is User Experience (UX) Design?
As per the standard definition, User experience (UX) design is the process of creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including all aspects of branding, design, usability, and function.
Actually, there was no clear role defined for UX/UI in Agile. As per Agile, the developers are responsible for the User Interface(UI). However, creating the UI of an application without understanding the user’s needs may keep everything on toss. This is where UX comes into picture. It’s always important to think about the End User experience. We should focus on:
- What end user is expecting from your product,
- where the user is struggling more,
- Where the user is facing challenges
- How our product is going to help him out.
So now a days, organizations have started fitting UX in Agile.
If there is any new feature needs to be added or any change request is needs to be incorporated (agile permits or allows changes at any stage of the development cycle)
it’s really challenging job for UX designers to accommodate those changes in short span of time.
Also, they must make sure that it will not look odd when considering end to end user experience
The major challenge here is, in Agile, sprints are of two to three weeks. To fit UX process in such a short span becomes difficult.
Ideally, the UX design should be part of sprint 0, in ideation phase only, which is later reviewed and revisited in the interval of every 2–3 sprints of product development cycle. Once the wire frame is ready, it is shared with end user or group of volunteers who are going to use product. Based on the feedback and rating, appropriate action is taken. The Development team always expect that design
should be ready by the time they start their work. So even if there are changes in design, that should happen earlier i.e. in N-1 sprint.
In simple term, we can say that UX should be included in a project as early as the ideation phase and involved throughout the project’s life cycle, including after launch support.
