UX in an agile development process

The user experience design process in an agile development environment supports the agile philosophy of iterating your work. With an agile development process, testing and revisions are ongoing, and the UX process is able to follow this same course. There are typically four phases to the user experience process in an agile environment. This is not intended to provide a detailed description of each element of UX design in an agile process, but instead provides a strategic overview of the process.

Planning your project

Regardless of whether you are creating a website or an app, the planning process is the start of the iteration. It’s useful to look at the problem you are trying to solve, and understanding how you’ll know if you’ve been successful. If you’re working on a later iteration, you don’t need to be thinking about the entire project, and possibly are looking at a UX challenge and how you’ll resolve and test one particular issue.

Implementing your plans

This involves creating the prototype, and is often what non-UX professionals see as the role of the user experience designer, because it’s the most visible part of the work. When the prototype is created, it can range from a paper prototype that is sketched, to a rough working version, or a prototype with only select components that are functional.

When working on a prototype to address specific problems, it’s useful to limit the functionality for testing to only those areas that directly impact what you are looking to test. For example, if working on a website revision where you want to validate a new navigational structure for menus, it’s possible for the prototype to only illustrate the navigations through the menus. Similarly, if there are more complex aspects to the development process, the UX designer can omit these from a prototype, and illustrate them through static screens if they are not directly related to the problem being addressed in a specific iteration.

Measuring Success

Measurement provides a way to determine whether you are moving in the right direction with your UX work. Measurement involves collecting data, generally through usability tests. These tests range from the UX designer performing a specific task to see if it feels right, to asking a colleague to try to perform a task, or involving test subjects that represent the target audience for the problem your app or website is seeking to solve. The measurement and testing for user experience doesn’t need to be a complex or time consuming process with each iteration, but it is important to gather this data as feedback for how your UX is performing.

Learning and Assessment

Taking stock of the data gathered in the measurement phase and recognizing what’s been learned from the iteration is the final phase before the process goes full circle, and returns to the next iteration. By assessing how successful the user experience has been for the current iteration, and understanding any areas where it has fallen short, you can return to the planning phase to start the next iteration. When you do, you’ll be equipped with useful information and lessons learned.

The user experience classes at American Graphics Institute discuss the iterative approach, and go into much greater detail about each of these phases. You can take these classes individually, or as part of the ux certificate program at AGI.