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I am currently reading some material by Jeff Patton regarding Agile and UX.


I was interested to find out from the community what UX design and testing behaviors seemed MOST helpful to their scrum teams to create GREAT and delightful products.

  1. hallway usability?
  2. paper prototypes?
  3. seeing how users actually use the software?
  4. others?


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I can't see how this relates to scrum. What usability testing that is performed is more depending on budget, needs, requirement,the type of product and the phase in the development cycle. –  Albin Sunnanbo Feb 5 '12 at 21:17
It's not part of scrum by definition. This is true. Scrum, however, does promote the concept that teams should produce "done" software every iteration. Many teams value usability in their design and testing per iteration. I was just interested to see what other teams might do this. –  Michael Rosario Feb 6 '12 at 13:13
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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Most important: Have a UX designer in the team from the beginning of the project

  • Paper prototypes: Cheap, quick, easy and you don't get lost in the details.
  • Hallway usability tests: Just gather thoughts from different perspectives
  • Tests with potential real users: Nothing more valuable than the real end users
  • AB testing: Test 2 different designs/menus/layouts/workflows. Measure usage. Decide which one to use.
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The activities you mentioned center around a verification of an UX design to see if it has met objectives/requirement and if it pleases the customer or not. Any or all of them should give you a clue on how well the design is done. I also agree with Albin that design and verification approaches really depends on a whole lot of different factors.

If you are concern with the "done" in Scrum you have to not only achieve a design that meets customer requirements but also upheld the quality of deliverable in current and future sprint (releases). UX testing can be painful but unfortunately you must be able to test and test well to build quality software.

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