Usability and Agile
In addition to may day job as a usability professional in the world of Internet marketing, I also moonlight as an officer in the Michigan chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association (and the soon-to-be-revived CHI chapter). Last week, we had the first MI UPA meeting of the year: an outstanding panel on Usability and Agile.
Agile wasn’t born with a clear place to fit user-centered design, but integrating usability seems to come down to a couple of strategies:
- Adding a planning stage to the beginning of the project to figure out what the team is going to build
- The usability person/people work on planning the UI for the next iteration while reviewing the previous iteration
Flexibility is also key, although I would suggest that any usability professional that wishes to stick to rigid structures is living in some kind of fantasy land.
My joking complaint about the meeting is that the panelists disagreed with each other too much. Perhaps that’s why I should never be invited to join a panel – I’d want to cause a disagreement just to make things more interesting. However, the audience was very engaged, despite the alignment of the panelists.