Why you need an awesome agile UX designer for your application

Agile design is part of Agile software development

We all relate software development to writing code and the process that comes along with moving that code from multiple engineers’ computers to a working live application.

Yes, smoothly delivering code is a big part of it but who’s designing what the customer or user sees?

Engineers are designing and developing the technical implementation and although many factor the user experience into what they do, it is not at the forefront of the problems they need to solve.

This is where an agile UX designer comes in.

An agile UX designer works within the development process but focuses on the user experience.

Their role is to make sure the developers have all the information they need to be able to solve the technical problem to the best of their ability.

Agile UX design speeds up development

An agile UX designer will work ahead of the engineers to make sure they have everything they need before starting that piece of work.

Often agile teams will work in “sprints”. A period of time is predetermined where a limited amount of work is focused on.

Often a design works one sprint ahead of the engineers.

An agile UX designer will focus on defining the user experience and design approach before the engineers pick up the work.

This makes for a smooth development process and happy engineers.

Agile designers will build a better product

The thing about design is that it will happen regardless of if you have an agile designer on your team or not.

If people are using your app though an interface, this means you have a ‘user experience’. It has been “designed”.

Could have been the founder of the software application or a sales person or an engineer. If this is the case, problems will become apparent.

Working with an agile designer means you have someone thinking solely about how to make the problem your software solves as easy and pleasant solution as possible.

What to look for when hiring an agile designer

Agile UX designers must have had experiences working in robust agile teams.

I say ‘teams’ as plural. Every agile team is different. Agile is about the people working on the team and performing together. Not about the process.

Having experience in multiple teams means the agile designer can bring real world experiences and previous context to any situation that may arise.