User Centred Design in Agile Application Development

Short Description
Agile methods are becoming increasingly common in application design, with their collaborative customer focus and iterative, test driven approach. They share many common principles, yet it is rare for Agile methods to incorporate user centred design. This paper argues that by incorporating user-centred design (and in particular using low fidelity prototyping as an iterative model for the application rather than time consuming code) better applications can be developed, delivering business benefit with a focus upon the end user and their experience.

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Content
A common theme of many IT projects is the friction between the different stakeholders involved in the project. They talk different languages; the developers think in terms of code, the business thinks in terms of business value and interface designers think in terms of customer experience. Reconciling these different languages can be a challenge (Figure 1). A criticism often levelled at user interface designers from the technical community is that they do not sufficiently consider the technical implications when creating interfaces. A usable and creatively well designed solution to a user centred problem may be a costly nightmare to code. Conversely, the interface design community often argue that leaving the user interface to the developers may result in a technically elegant solution that is difficult and unappealing to use. Both these positions however ignore the most critical stakeholder in any product design; the end user.
Martin (2002) identifies common fears that are present on many projects; the project will produce the wrong product, the product will be of inferior quality, the project will be late, the team will work excessive hours, commitments will be broken and ultimately the project will be a world of pain for all involved. Processes, constraints and deliverables are added to projects to help mitigate these fears; however they often become an end to themselves, making projects even more cumbersome and likely to fail. In an effort to overcome this project overload, a group of industry experts came together as the Agile Alliance and drafted a manifesto for a new way of developing software (Beck et al 2001). Key to the manifesto are;
· Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
· Working software over comprehensive documentation.
· Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
· Responding to change over following a plan.
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