Agile UX design is really the meeting point of an Agile project management methodology and your standard user experience design practices. A two-for-one if you will. Breaking it down further, the Agile development process is an iterative, cyclical approach that’s most often used in the world of software development. UX design is the process of crafting and shaping a site, app or product to create an exceptional and seamless user experience.
Agile UX meaning then is the intersection of both these processes; an iterative approach to improve UX.
Rest assured, we’ll dig beneath the surface in the following sections to sharpen the concept further.
Agile development, as mentioned, is chiefly a project management philosophy centered around collaboration and iteration. But what does that mean exactly? Well, since Agile is as much a mindset as it is a workflow model it’s instructive to take a look at another popular model, the waterfall approach, to get a better understanding.
With waterfall methodologies, development chugs along in a linear, sequential fashion with one phase starting only when the previous one finishes. You can think of it almost as an assembly line where the end is predestined and each stop along the way is its own function. Each step builds on the previous one with little direct collaboration and essentially zero deviation from the plan. Backtracking is of course difficult and time-consuming with this method.
Agile, meanwhile, takes a distinctly different tack and one that’s particularly well suited to the dynamics of software development. With an Agile approach, the process is broken down into smaller, more manageable increments aka sprints. Once the sprint planning is complete, collaboration and communication rule the day as teams work together to brainstorm, ideate, develop and build solutions. This is followed by evaluating, usability testing and validating en route to launching the feature or site…and then it happens all over again. Continuous improvement is the name of the game.
The Agile Manifesto ties it up and puts a bow on it nicely:
One is the workflow and philosophy behind it — Agile — while the other is the work itself — UX design. A better way to look at this though is that one facilitates the other, where Agile methodologies (i.e., Scrum, Kanban, Lean UX, etc.) are what help you create better UX.
That said, what is UX design exactly? We can’t leave you hanging without a definition:
UX design is the idea, and subsequent process, of taking into account the human side of a digital interaction – what the user needs are as well as the user behavior – in the pursuit of creating a more pleasant, easy to use, sticky and ultimately more people-centric experience.
Bringing agile development principles and UX together is a matter of shifting the way in which you tackle and think about projects. In that sense, any team can become an Agile team. Agile is the means to the end and integrating it into your product development team’s process can fundamentally transform your product for the better because responding to change — aka finding solutions — is at its core.
For UX designers, this might look like more customer touchpoints, incorporating collaborative software and