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Agile Experience Design: A Digital Designer's Guide to Agile, Lean, and Continuous
Agile development methodologies may have started life in IT, but their widespread and continuing adoption means there are many practitioners outside of IT--including designers--who need to change their thinking and adapt their practices. This is the missing book about agile that shows how designers, product managers, and development teams can integrate experience design into lean and agile product development. It equips you with tools, techniques and a framework for designing great experiences using agile methods so you can deliver timely products that are technically feasible, profitable for the business, and desirable from an end-customer perspective. This book will help you
309 pages, Paperback
First published November 8, 2011
32 people are currently reading
587 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
October 15, 2012
In my opinion, this book is a must-read for designers working with software.
It gives real insights on how to integrate design activities into the agile development process and what kind of mind-set is necessary.
However, it isn't just for designers. It's also interesting for any agile team member to get to know some currently overlooked skills and activities that an experience designer can add to the team.
It's important to stress out that this book doesn't explore experience design techniques in depth. It's much more focused on the integration of these tools into the process and the context of the agile team.
It gives real insights on how to integrate design activities into the agile development process and what kind of mind-set is necessary.
However, it isn't just for designers. It's also interesting for any agile team member to get to know some currently overlooked skills and activities that an experience designer can add to the team.
It's important to stress out that this book doesn't explore experience design techniques in depth. It's much more focused on the integration of these tools into the process and the context of the agile team.
April 4, 2020
This is a good read of you are fresh out of college/ grad school and never worked at a company before. Design is integrated well now than it was ten years ago. It’s still a simple read to understand how to work collaboratively with your team as a designer. I practice this a lot so for me personally I didn’t enjoy this book. The takeaways for
me could have been in a blog post. But if i had read this years ago it would have helped
me could have been in a blog post. But if i had read this years ago it would have helped
April 23, 2019
Easy to use as a quick-reference to Agile and Design, but with decent depth for more thorough study.
January 15, 2017
This is a UX design book that’s written through the lens of agile development. This book surprised me in that it focuses more on UX design than agile. I can see this book being useful to someone who knows a lot about agile and wants to learn more about UX design. It’s also useful for UX designers who want to learn about agile (like myself).
If you’re a senior UX designer, you may want to skim through the first half of the book like I did. It Chapters 8 and 9 of the book were most useful to me. At that point, the authors explain the core of agile such as writing user stories and developing a story map.
One of the more interesting things I learned from the book was the meaning of the word “customer.” Traditionally, in agile development, the customer is the client or the business. In UX design, the customer is the person who uses the digital product or service. The authors use the term customer to mean the latter. They suggest that agile team find a new term for the traditional word customer, such as client, business, or product owner.
I also discovered a gem in this book. On page 124, one of the authors explains how they worked on the site boo.com. Boo.com was a high-profile retail site during the dot com era. Like many sites in the dot com era, boo.com went under.
In focus groups, boo.com’s team learned that customers liked the idea of a virtual avatar to guide them through the site experience. But when customers actually saw the avatar, the reaction was negative. This example illustrates how focus groups and usability testing are different. Focus groups can tell you what people want (or what they think they want). But focus groups don’t actually show you what people do when they start using a design they think they want.
If you’re a senior UX designer, you may want to skim through the first half of the book like I did. It Chapters 8 and 9 of the book were most useful to me. At that point, the authors explain the core of agile such as writing user stories and developing a story map.
One of the more interesting things I learned from the book was the meaning of the word “customer.” Traditionally, in agile development, the customer is the client or the business. In UX design, the customer is the person who uses the digital product or service. The authors use the term customer to mean the latter. They suggest that agile team find a new term for the traditional word customer, such as client, business, or product owner.
I also discovered a gem in this book. On page 124, one of the authors explains how they worked on the site boo.com. Boo.com was a high-profile retail site during the dot com era. Like many sites in the dot com era, boo.com went under.
In focus groups, boo.com’s team learned that customers liked the idea of a virtual avatar to guide them through the site experience. But when customers actually saw the avatar, the reaction was negative. This example illustrates how focus groups and usability testing are different. Focus groups can tell you what people want (or what they think they want). But focus groups don’t actually show you what people do when they start using a design they think they want.
May 31, 2012
I saw this book as a suggested reading for DC UX day and thought I would give it a read. I first started doing agile design about a year ago now and I’m still a little confused about what are the “best” practices. I think this is because the combination of UX and agile software design is so novel that there still aren’t best practices. I thought a book like this, that looked like some pretty smart people had figured out the hard parts, was worth a peek.
In the end, I’m glad I read it, but I didn’t walk away with much more than I went into the reading with. The book is basically divided into two parts. The first 1/3 of mostly just about why to do agile with UX and how the two can be complementary to each other. The next 2/3s is how to do agile UX if you have never done it before.
The whole thing is pretty rudimentary and would be optimal for someone who either either in UX and has never ever done agile software design before, someone who is going to lead an agile team, or software engineers who are interested in pairing up with UXers. Basically, the book is not a set of best practices, which is what I had been looking for.
As a side note, the graphics, layout, and presentation are beautiful in the book. It is really easy to read. And, there is a whole series of helpful tools (e.g., an explanation of ethnography) in the back of the book.
In the end, I’m glad I read it, but I didn’t walk away with much more than I went into the reading with. The book is basically divided into two parts. The first 1/3 of mostly just about why to do agile with UX and how the two can be complementary to each other. The next 2/3s is how to do agile UX if you have never done it before.
The whole thing is pretty rudimentary and would be optimal for someone who either either in UX and has never ever done agile software design before, someone who is going to lead an agile team, or software engineers who are interested in pairing up with UXers. Basically, the book is not a set of best practices, which is what I had been looking for.
As a side note, the graphics, layout, and presentation are beautiful in the book. It is really easy to read. And, there is a whole series of helpful tools (e.g., an explanation of ethnography) in the back of the book.
March 26, 2017
A coherent and comprehensive guide to incorporating design into Lean & Agile product development methodologies, useful for anyone unaware of the value design can bring to the process, or for designers who are still struggling to adopt a less ‘Big Design Up Front’ (BDUF) way of working.
The guidance on shaping User Stories to convey the product vision and customer goals, rather than simply the smallest independent feature that development can feasibly release, is particularly valuable. More detail on this technique can be found in Jeff Patton's User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
The guidance on shaping User Stories to convey the product vision and customer goals, rather than simply the smallest independent feature that development can feasibly release, is particularly valuable. More detail on this technique can be found in Jeff Patton's User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
Want to read
May 20, 2012Starts out fairly hard to "get into" - even though the authors are clearly motivated to convey something they strongly believe in, it's amazing to me how hard it is to wade through the first chapter. It's all setup, strangely very dry and content-free. The payoff will likely come in the 2nd half of the book where they dig into tools and practices, but I figured I should start off by understanding the mindset of the authors, but slogging through the first chapter alone has been challenging to say the least.
April 10, 2013
A great book for those floundering to figure out how to balance a holistic UX approach with an Agile dev process. Our team struggled with this for a long time. Eventually we happened upon a good approach - this book confirms and refines that approach. It also gave me lots of new ideas to make the way I work less formal, more collaborative, and quicker without sacrificing thoughtfulness in my usability testing and UX design.
January 12, 2012
Endlich mal ein Buch, dass Agile nicht nur aus der Projektmanager-Sicht beleuchtet.
Viele von dem was dort steht, mache ich automatisch ... So, der Lernfaktor und der Wissensgewinn ist weniger hoch, als die Wiederholung.
Auch gut ist, dass man zitierfähige Stellen für Kunden und Vorgesetzte findet - mit eine Referenz läßt sich es einfach besser argumentieren.
Viele von dem was dort steht, mache ich automatisch ... So, der Lernfaktor und der Wissensgewinn ist weniger hoch, als die Wiederholung.
Auch gut ist, dass man zitierfähige Stellen für Kunden und Vorgesetzte findet - mit eine Referenz läßt sich es einfach besser argumentieren.
January 10, 2014
I'm disappointed, I wanted this to be better.
Vague writing.
Wordy.
Too long to be a good description of Agile. See "Agile Samurai" for that.
Description of Experience Design is not nearly good enough.
This may be the only book currently in print describing Story Mapping, but I'd recommend googling the web for that.
Vague writing.
Wordy.
Too long to be a good description of Agile. See "Agile Samurai" for that.
Description of Experience Design is not nearly good enough.
This may be the only book currently in print describing Story Mapping, but I'd recommend googling the web for that.
August 25, 2014
The first third of the book was boring to me because it was agile 101, but I'm glad I pushed through that because the rest of it was full of excellent material and examples. Highly recommended for product teams.
June 28, 2015
The author plods along with her examples of applying agile management methodology to software in a lean agile environment. I forced myself through the book. Ultimately, Agile for Dummies was much more informative.
March 15, 2013
Better in the second half, more useful methods and tools for sprint zero.
April 13, 2013
Brilliant,this is how projects should be executed.
July 24, 2013
Useful and interesting stuff, but a rather dry read.
I think it would have been better on paper than on kindle.
I think it would have been better on paper than on kindle.
April 29, 2017
GReat book with a broad view about UX and agile.
January 6, 2018
This book is mainly intended for a UX designer reader who wants to understand Agile. Anyway I found it interesting to understand some of the user interaction and design concept from their point of view. A very good summary of the current literature and state of the art of practices and methodologies to put together Experience Design and Agile methodologies. Is a very flowing reading but if you already are into Agile the first chapters may sound a bit boring. Is missing "the spark"
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews