Real-World Agile User Experience Design

Design processes described in books and taught in universities today were created with the assumption that design occurs before development and results in a detailed description of a product to build. In a healthy agile development process, product development begins long before there’s time to create a detailed design for the whole product. If the development is running smoothly, design benefits from direct collaboration with users, and design is informed by evaluating those users’ experience with working software. Designers working in an agile context have had to set aside the textbooks, and apply good design thinking to the day-to-day process they use. The result has been some innovative design practices that work well in an agile context, preserve a rigorous user experience design process, and arguably result in getting better software in the hands of people.

This short workshop is about real-world user experience design practices that have been emerging from agile and agile-like contexts over the last decade. You’ll hear concrete examples of innovative practices created by UX practitioners that are lighter-weight, more collaborative, and allow design to work as part of a holistic design and development activity. You’ll also get to try your hand at three specific techniques: programmatic personas for creating quick useful personas and identifying product design implications, user story mapping for creating user experience-centric user story backlogs, and design studio for collaborative ideation of user interface design ideas.