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How to make UX and Agile work better together
As a UX Manager, I’m constantly looking for ways to make our process more efficient, effective and enjoyable. The good thing is there’s no one-size-fits-all process. But that also makes it hard to define for your particular situation. With that in mind, our team at eharmony has made recent changes that can help inform the direction you take.
Pain Points
Competing Objectives
The main problem we encountered was aligning the design process with development cycles. Often the two have different objectives, timelines, and deliverables. The design team is trying to think beyond obvious solutions to give the business a competitive advantage. This requires timeframes that are hard to estimate. And, the output is sometimes more useful for further investigation or user testing than for production.
Engineers, on the other hand, have sprint commitments that need clear product requirements. Detailed specs improve the reliability of time estimates. For companies that feel the pressure to release code every sprint, the roadmap favors production work while neglecting innovation methods.
Dev Tools For a UX Process
Task management platforms, like JIRA, are used to track the effort and velocity of development work. Dev tickets are not the best place to include design concepts, user testing results or other UX output. They distract from the information needed to simply code and test a feature. Sprint planning meetings and tech sessions are also bad places to capture UX tasks.
So where does UX work fit in? How do we bring these distinct processes of design and development into alignment? Here are few options…
Options
Add UX tasks into dev tickets
One suggestion is to integrate UX work directly into sprint tickets. The goal is to account for these tasks and reflect the dependencies of dev tickets on design output (specs, prototypes, etc.). Developers have more visibility into the UX process and everyone is speaking…
