Two Case Studies of User Experience Design and Agile Development
How can user experience design (UED) practices be leveraged in Agile development to improve product usability? UED practices identify the needs and goals of the user through user research and testing. By incorporating UED in Agile development, user research and testing can be utilized to prioritize features in the product backlog and to iteratively refine designs to achieve better usability. Furthermore, integrating UED and Agile processes can be accomplished with little or no impact on release schedules. The cases studies presented in this paper describe two examples of UED and Agile integration at VeriSign.
We will compare our experiences with two Agile development projects where user experience design was successfully incorporated into one and not utilized in the other.
The projects differed in up-front research time, starting documentation and target users. For this experience report, they will be referred to as Falcon and Razor. Falcon was a brand new offering for an emerging consumer market. Razor was a redesign of an existing product with well-defined users and high-level marketing requirements in place.
Falcon successfully incorporated UED practices into the Agile development environment. From a UED perspective, developing this project using Agile methods resulted in a superior product with better user experience. In contrast, Razor did not incorporate UED practices. User testing, learning and refining was not incorporated.
We will also describe how to incorporate user experience methodologies into the Agile development process when you do not have a dedicated user experience team.