user experience... built to love

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build, measure, learn...repeat

UX analysis and design has improved software interaction quality over the years. With the advent of Agile, many study teams struggle with how to integrate the two.

Important to be agile throughout development, it's also important to know in advance who you're building it for and what they need.

UX can fit quite nice into Agile if you do research and prototype solutions one iteration ahead of development. It also helps to established a vocabulary of terms and design patterns for key interactions. This enables the team produce a consistent experience that addresses user concerns, with the least amount of documentation and the agility to move fast.

Software development is not a perfect science. What works in one scenario may not work in another. As a UX professional, it's not our job to always know all the answers, just how to discover them.

Learn by quickly prototyping solutions, test them with real users, then refine as needed. This way, you can identify interaction deficiencies before you spend a lot of money and resources building the product.

After the solution is built, define what success looks like. Deploy the product, then track the metrics to prove success.

You don't need an expensive usability test lab or engage a third-party service to get good test results.

Test early in the process with low-fidelty wireframes or prototypes created with WSYWIG tools such as Axure. Then use WebEx or another online meeting application to meet virtually with real users to see how they interact with the design. It only takes 5 to 7 people to quickly discover potential problems.

Watch for hesitations. Encourage participants to speak their thoughts out loud, and listen to what they say. Ask probing questions to understand the participant's perceptions. Discuss the findings with the team and be judicious about which perceptions to pay attention to, which ones to watch for the future, and which ones to act upon now.

testing on the cheap

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