Five agile UX myths
Diana DeMarco Brown · Journal of Usability Studies archive · 2013
As more and more user experience practitioners dip their toes into Agile waters, the practice of Agile user experience (UX) continues to evolve and mature. While researching my book on Agile UX (Agile User Experience Design: A Practitioner's Guide to Making It Work), I talked with designers, developers, and consultants about their experiences with Agile UX (the practice of designing the user experience in an Agile development environment, which is a flexible, incremental, iterative design process), and I continue to hear stories from the field when I give presentations and workshops in my local area. Some misconceptions evolved along with our practice and continue to persist and color how we approach design when working with a development team that engages in Agile software development. In my conversations with UX friends and colleagues who are in various stages of Agile adoption, I hear the same fears consistently expressed---for example, how will we fit usability testing in or how will we document our designs? Even the question of whether we can produce quality designs while working with the many iterations and frequent deliverables that are the hallmark of Agile. And yet, when I look at UX teams who are successfully implementing Agile UX, these concerns seem unfounded. But where there's smoke there's fire, and each of these issues merit closer examination so we can see what the real story is.