Re my recent post on developers and usability:
So says Jeff Patton, and I couldn't agree more. No matter how you approach user experience, you must set aside time and resources for it. It has to be in the company DNA - even if that value must be ported from an offline discipline.
Agile development provides fertile ground for user experience design. It may not provide as much support for usability. Regardless, user experience design - most notably including user-facing information architecture and usability testing - must be accounted for in budget and schedule.
I think that there is definitely space for Usability in Agile you just have to plan for it within your iterations (which tend to run 2-4 weeks long). One thing that I think would make a lot of sense is to train the project team how to do spot testing (quick tests with customers, not full-blown tests) to make sure that they are on the right track as their developing but book-end the project itself with usability testing.
ReplyDeleteGive them the tools to do what they need to do during the development phase and have a good solid lead-in and lead-out of the development and you would end up with a very strong application.