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Design and the Agile Method
In a recent post, Microsoft employee, ahem… wildchicken hurls some rather ill-founded accusations at something that is near and dear to me. In his opinion (or actually the opinion of several unnamed “respected” UX friends of his) the agile method and effective user experience design are not compatible.
“In the case of user experience people, a friend on mine whose judgment I highly respect estimated that it would take about 2x to 2.5x the number of user experience resources to adjust successfully to Agile. This guy’s a UX director at one of the world’s largest software companies, and he’s been around the industry for much longer than I have, and he’s just an all-around smart, well-read guy. He’s not one to exaggerate. One reason for this estimate is that many UX activities can be done serially, so a fewer number of people can do them and they roll from one thing to another. With Agile, you would need to do many of the same things in parallel, so you would need more people to do them.“
I guess that would be true on very large projects, where one designer is trying to support upwards of ten developers, but in my experience, on small agile teams, iteratively designing the interface with continual customer feedback is far better than the old ways of having an intake meeting, (perhaps) presenting a creative brief, and then going away for 2-4 weeks and coming back with a “completed” design for review. On an agile team, I get to see what the developers are doing – the challenges that they are facing, while my concepts are still forming, and I can adjust to make better decisions with more information and context.
“However I don’t believe that you can be strategic when all you can do is think in one month cycles, especially if you’re starting something big and brand new that requires a high level of design to be successful. Yes, you can be nimble and find ways around the problem. It’s still a problem.”
This is just dumb. Strategic thought should not be relegated to the beginning of a project or UX designers developing interfaces away from the “distraction” of developers and Customers. Strategic thought is not some “visioning” exercise where people try to foresee the future and plan for every eventuality. If agile practitioners have proved nothing, it is that making estimates and planning large scale projects as if they can pin down all the requirements up front, is faulty logic. There’s more…
“A number of people told me that Agile would help or has helped their teams overcome issues that they’ve had, like executive management not being in touch, devs not talking to PMs, testers being out of synch (sic), etc. What that tells me, however, is that the team has a fundamental problem with their team culture, and without addressing that the team is doomed to fail. Now if a process can help the team change its culture, great. But simply following a process for process’ sake isn’t a recipe for success. Don’t confuse culture with process.”
To make this statement is to deny reality. If “executive management not being in touch”, “devs not talking to PMs”, and “testers being out of synch (sic)” are isolated issues then the isolated are must be every company I have ever heard of, and everyone I have ever heard speak.
But I am not saying that Agile design or even the agile method is best suited to every project. I am not drinking the Kool-Aid or starting flame-wars. I am pragmatic and believe that Refactr has found that using a small team and agile methods in design and development have allowed us to do great things. Kevin Brady of Clarity Consulting seems to agree, at least with this sentiment:
I do think AGILE and SCRUM has its place. It is just that I believe this place is running projects under 5 people and delivery durations of less than 6 months. At that level, employing the right people with the right skills and motivation frequently guarantees that MAGIC will occur. The new media industry proves this everyday, irrespective of approach /method used. Good people always have the potential to overcome deficiencies with methods /approaches and poor management. I have seen it time and time again.
Related: Pair Design Pays Dividends (UX Magazine), my Agile Design slides from MinneBar 2006
This entry was posted by Ben Edwards on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Agile Processes, Design. 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.
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