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The modes of UX evaluation feedback vary by the preferences of the team and the agile flavor. Small issues may be handled by email or a conversation with developers. Larger issues will require bug reports or added stories that collect the UX recommendations.
Handling Code Freeze Those work well when stepping from one sprint to the next, but how about release freezes? It's not sensible to spend time testing, only to have the user feedback wash up in the next release backlog, rather than in the product. So the UX designer must flex the process, shorten up the testing cycle (fewer testers), and rely more on heuristics.
Don't Practice Your Mistakes Another fix comes from this observation: many UX bugs turn up repetitively. In some dev environments, as many as 30% of a feature's usabilty issues may be similar to those recorded testing other features. (Consistency, language, use of patterns, styles of interaction, etc.)
This requires the UX designer to document the UX thinking and propogate it to management and the development teams, in material such as basic UX acceptance principles and heuristics. (Acceptance 'principles' instead of 'criteria', because they are seldom yes/no questions.)
Making it Work... But there are some steps to bringing that adoption. The UX designer must find and cultivate UX management champions. For them, strategic arguments about the relationship of UXD to brand, user evaluations on ProNormal and Likert scales, and methods of setting story priorities for each release are useful.
Don't ignore strategic thinking... In a more tactical environment such as 2009's leaner teams, it is harder to make strategic arguments stick. Stakeholders are looking for numbers, not user satisfaction. But it is an unwise choice to let UX debt pile up over multiple releases.
UX impact directly measured... There are two measurements arising from usability testing that prove tactically useful in user experience design. The Liekert and ProNormal scales provide direct user feedback on the quality of a feature and its influence on brand. These are low-cost measurements derived at the same time as functional usability testing.
Integrating User Experience Design with Agile
Practical Lessons There are practical lessons from doing user experience design and usability evaluations in an agile environment. There is a finite length to each sprint and release cycle, and the lag of testing and feedback creates the risk of not getting the user input into the feature.The modes of UX evaluation feedback vary by the preferences of the team and the agile flavor. Small issues may be handled by email or a conversation with developers. Larger issues will require bug reports or added stories that collect the UX recommendations.
Handling Code Freeze Those work well when stepping from one sprint to the next, but how about release freezes? It's not sensible to spend time testing, only to have the user feedback wash up in the next release backlog, rather than in the product. So the UX designer must flex the process, shorten up the testing cycle (fewer testers), and rely more on heuristics.
Don't Practice Your Mistakes Another fix comes from this observation: many UX bugs turn up repetitively. In some dev environments, as many as 30% of a feature's usabilty issues may be similar to those recorded testing other features. (Consistency, language, use of patterns, styles of interaction, etc.)
This requires the UX designer to document the UX thinking and propogate it to management and the development teams, in material such as basic UX acceptance principles and heuristics. (Acceptance 'principles' instead of 'criteria', because they are seldom yes/no questions.)
Making it Work... But there are some steps to bringing that adoption. The UX designer must find and cultivate UX management champions. For them, strategic arguments about the relationship of UXD to brand, user evaluations on ProNormal and Likert scales, and methods of setting story priorities for each release are useful.
Don't ignore strategic thinking... In a more tactical environment such as 2009's leaner teams, it is harder to make strategic arguments stick. Stakeholders are looking for numbers, not user satisfaction. But it is an unwise choice to let UX debt pile up over multiple releases.
UX impact directly measured... There are two measurements arising from usability testing that prove tactically useful in user experience design. The Liekert and ProNormal scales provide direct user feedback on the quality of a feature and its influence on brand. These are low-cost measurements derived at the same time as functional usability testing.