UX Agile

04 June 2009 | Agile, Travels | andy

I’m looking forward to attending the Usability Professional’s Association (UPA) conference next week. There’s a slew of agile focused events.

I’m participating in the Best Practices of UCD in AgileWorkshop on Monday, organized by Cindy Lu, Lynn Miller (DBLP, ‘05 podcast), and Thyra Rauch (I-D).

Here’s an excerpt from my position paper for the workshop on the critical issues of UX and Agile.

Three of the four founding premises of agile “Working software over comprehensive documentation”, “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”, “Responding to change over following a plan” are, in principle, strong foundations on which to create highly usable software products. The drive to reach working, testable software enables rapid feedback. The focus on involving the customer plays to UX methodologies and a willingness to respond to change recognizes that even the best intuition is often not capable of producing the value of a few iterations.

On the other hand of the coin, the focus on individuals and interactions over processes and tools and openness to change presents huge challenges to the UX practitioner. The uncertainty of the actual features that will be accomplished and the inclination to avoid big upfront design favors immersion in the team room to the detriment of off-site research.

And another from my wisdom on how to deal with the challenges:

A mix of upfront design work at varying levels of fidelity, real time collaboration, and roadmap aligned user research is the approach that has worked for me. Additionally, making maximum use of the data streams already available, like support requests and web analytics, can help reduce the cost of applying actual user data to product planning and UI execution. Opportunistic re-use of customer engagements at conferences for usability testing is another way to maximize time out of the team room.

Of course, I also harp on striking the word “deliverables” from the UX vocabulary.

On the main agenda, we’ve got:

• Wed: Coherent Agile User-Centered Design. From Desiree Sy (Autodesk, I-D profile)
  

  “Building on previous talks describing successful adaptations of formative usability testing, contextual inquiry, and iterative prototyping for Agile, this talk delves further, describing a framework for creating multi-sprint designs and getting them implemented without violating the Agile taboo against “big design.”

• Wed: Agile Success: A User Experience Case Study. From Melissa Federof (DBLP), Catherine Courage (Salesforce profile, DBLP, I-D), Craig Villamor (I-D, Twitter).
• Wed: When User Experience (UX) met Agile: A case study. From Kuldeep Kelkar, Soojin Jeong, Michael Budwig (PayPal).
  

  We hope that others can avoid the common pitfalls that we faced in our initial adjustment to agile and scrum.

• Thu: Iterate, Scale and Simplify: Techniques for adapting user experience methods for Agile teams. From Carissa Demetris.
  

  “How can the User Experience team keep up in this fast-paced, iterative world? “

• Thu: Traits of Successful Agile UX Designers. From Lynn Miller.
• Fri: Agile User Experience: Strategy and Design Research above and beyond Sprint 0. From Nancy Frishberg (I-D, SlideShare), Thomas Lissajoux (Systemes Agiles blog), Colleen Page (DBLP), Leo Frishberg (I-D).
  

  “What strategies are successful in sustaining a healthy process for both UX and development?”

Keep an eye on this blog and the uxagile twitter stream next week for notes from the experience.