Most companies that provide a digital product have already shifted to agile methodologies. Before, valuable insights would come from a “big design up-front” effort that would trickle down to development teams. With shifting to Agile, it’s easy to skip over these important insights.
Output from visual design, product design, or customer and business insights still exist for a reason and there needs to be ways to maintain healthy relationships between discovery and execution teams.
UX can play an integral and promotional piece to the team by creatively exploring areas that other team members might have missed.
One of these ways is recognition of UX as a balanced team player; ideally upon project inception. Rarely does a client realize the level of discovery that is necessary to produce a thoughtful, enjoyable, user centered product. When UX is introduced to a team later in a product or development lifecycle, it can play a vital role in designing incremental improvements while avoiding any feeling of playing “catch-up”.
It's important to recognize when a project is not living up to the expectation of its stakeholders and/or users. When this is noticeable, UX can play an integral and promotional piece to the team by creatively exploring areas that other team members might have missed.
Instructions & Framing
When creating a test, you’ll want to give the testers a brief scenario of what is happening. Due to the nature of this platform and testing, you’ll be getting feedback from people who may or may not be actual users (although they might be at some point depending on the platform you’re testing).
Depending on the flow you want feedback on, a customer may also need to have the scenario set up for them.
Examples include:
- Inclusivity of users through interviews
- Defining and diagraming the customer's journey
- Or facilitating cross-functional workshops for team alignment
Agile UX - Four key values
- Prioritizing individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Prioritizing working software over comprehensive documentation
- Prioritizing customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
If your team doesn’t already incorporate UX into their development lifecycle you could be missing out vital discovery work would save your team time and save your users from frustration that could have been avoided.
