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This 30 min experience report gives attendees another perspective on how one software company is approaching selling and executing user experience projects using Agile methodologies. Specifically, we will focus on our experience and approach to expanding User Research (UR) component in our projects. We feel that UR is vital to a successful software project but is the hardest part of User Experience to sell because it is often viewed as 1) taking more time, 2) costing more money, 3) slowing down development, and 4) unnecessary (“we already know the users”). This report details what it took for us to push UR despite these obstacles and why it has been worthwhile. We have many lessons learned that we believe can benefit other teams who are in similar circumstances. We have about half a dozen projects that have used an Agile approach from which to frame our learning.

The report touches on five key points:

1. Value We will start with a very short overview of what our company believes about the value gained from performing User Research (UR) in software development and how that was reinforced in early projects.

2. Challenges Then we’ll move into the challenges our team faced while trying to include UR into an existing Agile/Scrum process. The challenges include: time, budget, lack of developer and management understanding of UX and the desire for tangible deliverables.

3. Approach Next we’ll move into the approaches we used to break UR activities into smaller and more iterative chunks that fit better into an Agile environment.

4. Techinques Also, we’ll discuss specific UR techniques we used, such as: remote contextual inquiry, pluralistic walkthroughs, surveys, interviews, participatory design and informal think-alouds.

5. Roles Finally we’ll talk about how we organized project teams and the effects different roles have on the quality of user research and which roles can benefit from participating in UR.

Background: We are a new UX practice and a national design center in a well-established national systems integrator and Microsoft gold partner. The UX team had little to no prior exposure to Agile, while the sales and technical teams, in turn, had not previously worked with a user experience team. Together, they realized that a completely new approach would be needed in order to integrate strong user-centered design principals with a flexible Agile development process.