I've been searching around and came across a number of articles talking about the uncomfortable relationship between agile and user experience. The consensus appears to be that though challenging, user experience can be incorporated into agile practices and help produce not just working software but also usable ones. Of course it is possible, user experience professionals will make sure the user is heard regardless of what development methodology is used. To me the issue is not whether UE can be incorporated into agile, but how can UE transform agile approaches so improved user experience is part and parcel of agile approaches.
Note that innovation does not feature when talking about agile but references to 'the simplest thing that could possibly work' are common. Well, this is probably fair because you cannot possibly innovate without real insights into user needs and behaviours. Anyway,
- Regardless of how UE can be bolted on to agile we need to remember that agile is a software development methodology and all its practices, tools, artifacts are designed around helping developers build working software: Producing working code is at the core of agile, user expedience is not.
- Agile approaches are supposed to make the developers' life easier, the processes used are designed to help developers successfully build and test (note not necessarily user testing) small pieces of software in small periods of time thus minimising risk. In that sense, agile approaches are inward looking.
- Focusing on customers is not the same as focusing on user. 'Customer' in agile is quite a vague term that incorporates the client, owner of the product to be built, as well as the final user base. As a UE practitioner I would argue that identifying and prioritising the end users is critical to building successful interactive products.
- Agile passes the usability bucket over to what is called the 'product owner', which in most cases would be the client, internal or not, commissioning the work. Agile, here, makes a dangerous assumption, namely that companies have a clear and deep understanding of their customers' needs and motivations. Furthermore, assuming that there is someone at the client organisation that 'owns' the customer - which would normally mean they own and manage customer segmentation based on market research, not user research, - it is not likely that they will be the 'product owner' .
- To end my thoughts on a positive note,... User Stories, well there is something that can make agile uer cnetred... let's see...
More thoughts soon...
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