To integrate UX activities into an agile software development process can be tough. Just consider this discussion between Kent Beck the creator of Extreme Programming and Alan Cooper a leading proponent of Interaction Design.

I’ll divide what Alan is talking about into two things: a set of techniques, and the larger process into which they fit. While I’m 100 percent with the techniques themselves, I’m 100 percent against the process that he described for using them. The techniques are optimized for being thoughtful in a cognitively difficult, complicated area where you’re breaking new ground, and the thinking that’s embedded in the practices is absolutely essential to doing effective software development.

The process, however, seems to be avoiding a problem that we’ve worked very hard to eliminate. The engineering practices of extreme programming are precisely there to eliminate that imbalance, to create an engineering team that can spin as fast as the interaction team. Cooperesque interaction design, I think, would be an outstanding tool to use inside the loop of development where the engineering was done according to the extreme programming practices. I can imagine the result of that would be far more powerful than setting up phases and hierarchy.

To me, the shining city on the hill is to create a process that uses XP engineering and the story writing out of interaction design. This could create something that’s really far more effective than either of those two things in isolation. (Kent Beck)

The techniques that Cooper proposes seek to define the behavior of software products “from the point of view of understanding and visualizing the behavior of complex systems, not the construction of complex systems.” He views “interaction design as part of the requirements-planning or product-planning process rather than as something that comes after the product planning is done.”

Despite the fact that its tough to integrate agile and user centered design approaches it is possible because there are similarities – most notably the desire to create useful software. Take, for example, Alistair Cockburn’s comparison of agile development to a cooperative game:

Software development is a (resource-limited) cooperative game of invention and communication. The primary goal of the game is to deliver useful, working software. The secondary goal, the residue of the game, is to set up for the next game.

And as the name suggests, user centered design is about placing people, users of a piece of software, at the centre of the design process – making software that is useful to them – to do this effectively UX professionals seek to understand user goals and motivation through user research.

Or put another way user centered design helps us understand how people use our products, while agile development let us build and deliver software that is more relevant to its users. Both approaches are trying to deliver meaningful software products to people.

The problem then is not because the two approaches are trying to achieve something different but rather the way of achieving it is different; and specifically the sequencing of events and the time given to different aspect of the product development life cycle. Agile’s iterative development cycle is its key strength, but it also makes for some tight deadlines and people often question whether there is sufficient time to fully consider the users’ needs? However, as Alan Cooper suggests, the time to define the user’s needs is not during the development but before the development starts.

I’ve written previously about using an envisaging team to scout out ahead. Not to design the solution but to understand the problem space – understand what the business needs, what users need, who the users are and what the technology ecosystem looks like – and report this back in a coherent fashion to the rest of the team. This isn’t Big Design Up Front by another name. The envisaging team’s work should be limited to discovery work only. This combined with regular rounds of user testing between each iteration – the results of which are fed into the next round of development – can mean that agile software development can be highly user focused.

Photo: The User, by Pete Ashton. Used under licence.