Agile & Lean UX

In the real world, UX designers don't sit in an ivory tower perfecting a design for six months. They work in fast-paced environments alongside engineers and product managers using Agile methodologies.

Lean UX vs Traditional UX

Traditional UX focuses heavily on comprehensive deliverables (100-page research reports, perfectly annotated wireframes). Lean UX throws that away. The core premise of Lean UX is: "Stop designing deliverables and start designing outcomes." It focuses on rapid prototyping, continuous testing, and shipping an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as fast as possible to gather real-world data and based on that data, create improvements to the application.

Dual-Track Agile

In a Scrum environment, the team works in 2-week "sprints." If a designer is in the same sprint, they become a bottleneck because development cannot start until the design is finished. The Solution: Dual-Track Agile. The design team works on a "Discovery Track," researching and designing features one or two sprints _ahead_ of the engineering team, who operate on the "Delivery Track."

The reason for Agile is to deliver features as soon as possible while gathering feedback from the users. Traditional software development methodologies are slow since they follow the waterfall approach and they need to finish completely one phase of the project before moving to the next one without ideas of the usefulness of the features developed. Agile is more about learning and even failing as fast as possible while learning from users.

More on Agile

Traditional and Modern Software Development Life Cycle Methodologies Understanding Agile UX: The Complete Guide Lean UX & Agile: Study Guide Agile Design