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Integrating UX into Agile for Improved Product Development​

Integrating UX into Agile for Improved Product Development

This highlights the challenges of balancing agile processes with user experience design and provides solutions such as embedding UX into agile workflows, using dual-track design, and leveraging user story mapping. By aligning UX efforts with development backlogs and utilizing design sprints, teams improved collaboration, reduced risk, and enhanced the overall product experience, ensuring user needs are met throughout the development cycle.

Challenges

  • Insufficient time to conduct design activities
  • Tunnel vision: team members don’t pay much attention to the larger context of user experience
  • Agile processes prioritize getting shippable code out the door and does not prioritize a thoughtful user experience
  • Absence of user research and usability testing

Solutions

  • Embed UX into our agile process
  • Dual track design and development process
  • Incorporate UX into our backlog: request, maintain and communicate UX work within Jira

User Story Mapping

  • Communicate and collaborate via user story maps
  • Integrate user story mapping tools with Jira
  • Story maps encourage productive, user-centered discussions about product creation
  • Allow teams to see the bigger picture
  • User-story maps reveal logical and releasable slices of product increments that meet users’ needs, while uncovering impacts and areas of risk ahead of development
  • Context, prioritization, delivering value
  • Improve collaboration and team alignment
  • Identify and deprioritize risky stickies in the story map
  • Replace with other low-risk ideas with the same value proposition
  • Design time management:

Dual Track
80/20 rule
  • Design
1-2 Sprints Ahead
  • UX will look at the highest priorities in the backlog and start UX work needed.

Design Sprint Activities

Discover & Define

  • User stories
  • User flows
  • Current customer journeys
  • High level MVP
  • Sketch refinement
  • Group brainstorm
  • Research
  • Define personas
 
Design
  • Wireframes and interaction specification
  • Future customer journey
  • Story acceptance criteria
  • High fidelity prototyping
  • Customer testing

Track Discovery Velocity

  • Use discovery velocity to quantify the units of information or knowledge acquired during discovery work in a sprint.
  • Tracking discovery velocity over time will also help estimate the time needed in discovery and set expectations for the types of information and level of detail that can be realistically achieved during sprint timeframes.

Prioritizing small, high-value increments allows teams to deliver to users early and often. Discovery provides crucial insights for understanding user needs and enables effective iterative development. However, in Agile, UX professionals often skip or rush discovery due to tight timeframes, leading teams to prioritize features and solutions without proper research—a risky approach.

How to involve UX in the SCRUM teams

  • UX Leads attend backlogs and sprint planning
  • If UX Designers are not embedded into the SCRUM team, Product Owner invites the UX Designer to attend SCRUM ceremonies: sprint reviews, daily scrums, retrospective.

Concern
UX team members will not be able to attend ceremonies of SCRUM teams because they are not co-located.

Solution
Setup communication channels and be readily available to help with design issues and questions in the stories that developers are working on.
(Need more detailed plan)

Separate backlogs for UX and development

  • We recommend a separate backlog for UX and development
  • UX-related tasks are created based on backlog items from the product backlog
  • Requires a lot of discipline and communication
  • Ideal for a shared UX team

Pros and Cons of Separate Backlog

Pros

  • The UX team is making decisions of what needs to get done and when, and it can plan for upcoming backlog items (Due date before sprint start date). 
  • UX works ahead of development and there will be less risk of holding up developers in a sprint.
  • Maintain consistency across all engineering products/teams such as mobile, web, SFDC.

Cons

  • Difficult to measure team velocity, however UX is not part of the Scrum teams.
  • Risk of losing work if items are deprioritized. Need to focus UX design work on current and next sprints.

Acceptance Criteria

  • PO adds Checkbox in ticket “UX Impact”  <-> UX looks at the backlog
  • Add a Definition of ready:
    • Acceptance criteria clearly articulated by UX
    • Visuals are available
    • Solution has been tested
    • Design adheres to design system
    • The item has been reviewed
    • Tested accessibility standard
  • OPT: Have a “Definition of Done meeting” after development and before development Demo: UX needs to approve and any tweaks that UX requests need to be implemented before Dev Demo.  Record the demo before doing the demo and get UX feedback and then demo.

Suggestions

  • 1 full day per sprint on UX Debt epic items
  • 1 UX + 1 UI Engineer work together to close out UX Debt tickets
  • Responsive views, accessibility, CSS styling, visual designs, and consistency..
  • Significant feedback from a customer
    Regular UX audit
  • UX meets once a week to check: UX velocity, dependencies, blockers..