[Sigia-l] Agile & User Experience: What are the common denominators?

[Rich Rogan]

Hi Dave,

The IxDA organization has many discussions regarding Agile and UX, my first
inquiry with this topic on IxDA was almost 4 years ago. Check out "ixda.org"
list serve.

To give you a quick summary of the IxDA discussion, (most of this you
probably already know):

Agile is an umbrella of flexible project management, requirements gathering
and engineering methodologies, which allow for rapid/dynamic project change,
in order to realize cost savings, improved visibility, and increased product
quality.

All of this looks great on paper and works pretty well in many cases, except
as Agile was for the most part invented by savvy engineers for engineering
purposes, they "forgot" about the user experience.

(No kidding about the above statement, my first person experience - I was in
a Scrum training session with Jeff Sutherland, (co-founder of Scrum), and
asked him what the Scrum plan was to integrate "User Interface design","User
Interaction" and "Usability". He was at a complete loss for words, he had
never even thought about integrating UX/IA/ID in scrum.)

This big hole of "non-inclusion" of the "user or user surrogate", or
"Interface/Interaction design" at all, makes Agile methodologies good for
developing code, but not necessarily for developing good products.

Then we IA/UX/ID'ers come along with our focus on good products from the
users perspective, and realize Agile can be great for Usability and Design
as well, the methodologies just need a few "UX Design plugings".

And so we figure out how to integrate IA/UX/ID in the Agile methodology,
and the rest is history, (until something better/newer then Agile comes
along, (repeat at story beginning, possibly changing characters around ;)).

Generally the way we integrate into Agile methodologies is mirroring the
"engineering perspective" from a "design perspective", with integrated user
input, one step ahead of engineering, with the flexibility for last minute
change management, (IxDA list has all the details).

Hope that helps, best of luck with your presentation :)

J. Rich Rogan






On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 4:06 PM, Dave Robertson
<droberts at thoughtworks.com>wrote:

> Hello!
>
> First - apologies to subscribers of Agile-Usability and IxD for
> cross-posting...
>
> My name is Dave Robertson, and although you can't see him, this is my
> partner, John (JJ) Johnston. We've been asked to deliver a presentation
> for friends of ThoughtWorks Canada in January (to which all of you are
> welcome to come, but more later). JJ is an agile guy who's interested in
> user experience and I'm the user experience guy who's interested in Agile.
>
>
> We've decided to make an argument that Agile and UX share a number of
> common values and that these values should form a foundation for better
> integration (rather than simply trying to mash together our respective
> techniques or chucking rocks at opposing sides).
>
>


-- 
Joseph Rich Rogan
President UX/UI Inc.
http://www.jrrogan.com