Like a majority of folks, I generally read Jakob Nielsen’s articles with some skepticism. But in this case it’s an insightful read and worth the time and money to purchase this article:

Agile User Experience Projects by Jakob Nielsen

There are some good points raised in this article in regards to approaching an “Agile” like process. One obvious point to raise is that “Agile” was originally developed to help expedite engineering teams with ever changing requirements. Creating a mental model of a marine of sorts. Adapt, prioritize and overcome if you will.

This same process and mental model is advantageous to the UX portion of product development. But again it’s not a science it’s an approach/framework of a process. I am by no means an expert, and I should of stated this upfront ,  but my experience has taught me that a combination of a waterfall and agile seems to work the best.

A waterfall inevitably turns into an agile process at some point during it’s lifespan and I liken that transformation as a “fire drill”. Which sometimes is not a bad thing. That last 5% of the development seems to be where things really take shape and succeed or linger and fall flat.

Whereas if you separate out UX & development you can allow the UX team to get ahead of the curve. Thus allowing the UX team to get far enough along that they can generate informative & useful deliverables for the client and engineering teams. So by combining the two approaches you have a shortened waterfall that turns into a “controlled burn”. It’s in the “control burn” that the design & development teams are reacting to each other along with the business owners

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Design, User Experience (UX), LinkedIn, Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.