For the last three years, we have been on the forefront of an experiment in conducting user experience and creative design for consumers with an agile software development model. In my continuing effort to blog about the work that we are doing, both good and bad, you will read about this effort, and its benefits and challenges often.
There are three principles that I believe are critical to great experience design in an agile model:
- Do you know the core features of your product? If you know what the core features of your product should be, you can then use a very good collaboration model to continuously iterate and evolve the product as an experience and a technology.
- Do you know what users you care about? Everyone will have an opinion about the early versions of features you release. Often, you will release features that are not as robust as you want them to be so you have to be ready to know what feedback matters and what feedback is distracting. Knowing your users helps you manage the clutter.
- Do the different team members appreciate the value of each others skill? A critical component to making product development get the full value from an agile model is skill appreciation. The engineering team much appreciates the craft of experience design and the designers value the importance of solid technical foundations with iterative software releases. It sounds "duh" to make sure the team understands each other, but the collaboration required to get the full value out of agile models can no underestimate the importance of appreciation versus understanding.
If you can answer yes to the above principles, the rapid nature of design, develop and release can become a powerful factor in your time to market and reaching the user base you care about. We are definitely not perfect in implementing these principles - in fact, it has led to some pretty interesting experiences for our users, but more about that next time.
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