I recently had a “conversation” on Facebook with a colleague here at Channel4 and a friend from Ireland. They had responded to a status update (courtesy of twitter) which said that I was having an interesting conversation about Agile UX with a couple of people over a beer.

How User Experience fits within an Agile process is something that I’ve been really interested in and, indeed, in a former role I was part of the PIG (Process Improvement Group) where we came up with our flavour of Agile which ingrained UX into the methodology.

User stories:

All stories need to be user centric in my opinion, “As a user I want to…”. The means that your development process is completely user centric and end to end. I’ve seen this done as an Epic being the user centric component and the Stories and Tasks being more system focussed . Agile is flexible, the methodology can be tailored to suit your needs… As long as the user is at the center!

Iteration Zero:

The all important one. This needs to be a few weeks at the very least, depending on the size of the project. This is where the IA and UX work gets done and the design work. Here’s where I may get some criticism, but I don’t think that estimates and actuals from Iteration/Integration Zero should be used to calculate your multiplier. This is the thinking, experimenting, prototyping, brainstorming and researching phase. It’s different to the build phase.

But, it should be iterative in itself (which is why I prefer the term Integration Zero). Try ideas, discard, try something new… cycle and iterate.

UX should be an integral and embedded part of the Agile team:

A UX person should be embedded in the Agile team for the duration of the project. That person should attend the iteration review/planning meetings etc. The UX person should be a stakeholder and decision maker – but without being seen as a blocker or hinderance. This plays into the evangelism aspect of our role, as UX practitioners.

Don’t be afraid to get things wrong and to do them again:

Too often the principle of iterating over things gets put aside in Agile implementations. You need to be able to make a mistake and do something different. This is why iterations are short, so that you can be nimble and react. This is especially true with the interaction design. Things may not be possible or new things may be possible. The interactions designed might not work or may have tested badly – identify that and change it early!

As a feature is developed Guerrilla Usability test it. Be confident to tinker with and refine the interaction design and to make changes that improve the usability of a feature and the overall usability of the application/website.

These are just some of my thoughts and maxims – some will agree some will disagree. I think it’s important that we continue to think about Agile and UXand how they work together. On paper they are a match made in heaven – we just need to iron out the details.