How Providing UX in Agile: Design Lead and Product Owner

By Luca Longo from the blog of CourseUX.com

Today, I’ll talk about my experience working as a UX Lead in an agile company.

Just to make sure, I’m not going to talk about using agile during your design process, Google already published an excellent document about that.

In this article, you are going to learn how to provide UX in Agile teams, how to work with Product Managers, and with outsourced companies.

Agile Introduction

Let’s make a short introduction to Agile methods.

Since agile has been introduced in the development of applications, both the overall quality and the speed of delivery of the software have improved.

The Agile Manifesto emphasizes people and interactions over processes and tools.

Performances are brilliant working in agile.

If a principal measure of success is the UX quality, then the outcome of the agile development project depends very much on the whole team to merge trained design specialists into the project.

The user experience (UX) of any application is a deciding factor of whether it is successful or not. As such, it is becoming imperative for developers to merge UX processes with agile development teams in order to match user expectations.

In the past was quite different.

Understanding the user’s needs was the responsibility of the product owner, and this leads to the quality of the user experience resting on someone who didn’t necessarily have the skills in UX design.

This was detrimental, especially in big development projects.

Two methods to take into consideration:

1. The agile ideal. With this method, the members of the team possess a variety of skills, from programming and quality assurance to architecture, contents, and UX design. In scaled agile development, however, there needs to be some kind of UX design coordination: the UX Lead.