User Experience Design in an Agile Development Cycle

Posted by uidesigner on Mar 30th, 2007 | 0 comments

The title pretty much says it all. After working for a while now in an agile development model. I’ve discovered several disturbing things that really cause a loss of sanity. The agile development cycle is quite fast. Depending on your team it has different lengths. Most iterations seem to be 1 week long. During that week developers develop working software. Notice I said working software and not “USABLE.”

The primary prescribers to the agile method believe that the UI should pretty much just be slapped on at the end. I paraphrase but something to the likes of “Leave The UI out until the last possible moment.” I find this to be extremely scary. Especially when the thought process behind the agile development methodology is to think of the end user. So to put this all into perspective. We have one side of this method that says leave out the UI until the end but keep the user in mind when creating the story (feature). I know when I first heard this I was a bit shocked by the contradictory nature. So like any process I attempted to make it my own and mold the process to my own needs.

more to come…

Related articles:

  1. Agile UI Design: A Fundamental Miscalculation in UI Design Excellence?
  2. Agile UI Design Series: UI Design in an Agile Project Cycle Part 1
  3. The Haves, Have Nots & Feature Bloated User Experience.
  4. Design Experiences: Don’t Rub Your Product Experience All Over Me.
  5. Design Lessons: Should You Rush Your Design To Market or Stall it for Great Design?

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