Declan Whelan

Earlier this year I participated on a panel hosted by the IxDA Toronto Group. There were some great insights into getting Agile and User Experience (UX) practices working together. In this post I just want to mention one of them.

Consider having a parallel track for UX work such as prototyping that gathers information for upcoming iterations. You can also use this track to evaluate the output from the previous development sprint.

Desirée Sy from Autodesk (formerly Alias) describes this eloquently in an article she wrote for the Journal of Usability Studies, “Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-centered Design”. This paper is intended for a User Experience professional looking to adopt Agile practices. The above image is from Desirée’s paper (see notes below).

Lynn Miller, also from Autodesk, pointed to paper she wrote for  the Agile 2005 conference, “Case Study of Customer Input For a Successful Product”. This paper is intended for Agile teams looking to benefit from User Centered Design practices. It also discusses the parallel track concept.

---

Image above is from The Journal of Usability Studies, Vol. 2, Issue 3, May 2007, pp. 118 and reuse is subject to the following:

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright 2006, ACM.