Agile Design and its significance in UX
The most popular software-development methodology
Definition
Agile design method is heavily used in software development these days. It favours iterative short cycles that require frequent deliveries, continuous feedback from customers and stakeholders, sustainable development and simplicity.
Few points from Agile manifesto
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
When and where will it work?
For agile to work in an organisation the UX professionals and development team must work together. Not just the managers but everyone has to exhibit leadership qualities. Good communications only occur when there is trustfull and a supportive environment.
Actively supporting co-workers, taking responsibilities, investing time in UX research and sharing the findings, helping other coworkers in usability testing and building empathy, also facilitating and observing diversions during the sprint are many examples where a supportive environment would excel.
Familiarising with words like sprint, scrum, the backlog, user stories and epic is helpful to understand agile.
Conclusion
What I have understood is the agile process majorly focuses on empathetic or emotional connect of the product with its users. To achieve that it promotes organisational internal harmony and motivation, we have seen it also wants the method to be continuous process that bring multiple iterations as UX team gets to know more about the user needs. It favours short sprints (for 1–2 week) with an incremental approach along with quality and efficiency
