Are you looking to hire designers into your team or currently have designers on your team, but aren’t sure how to start integrating them into your agile ceremonies? The team at my current company is pretty small, so we’ve all had to embrace the uncertainty and roll with the punches (true spirit of agile, amirite?) These five strategies are how our team has built a culture of collaboration with our developers : including your designers in your day-to-day agile processes, creating cross-functional teams, encouraging rapid iteration, implementing UX reviews into your development process, and standardizing what you ask for in user stories.
1) Invite designers to all agile activities.
Ensure your designers are active participants in all of your regular agile activities, including daily stand-ups, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retros. If you run design sprints separately, ensure they run congruent with the project timeline.
2) Create cross-functional teams.
Your designers should be embedded throughout the research and development process. Designers should be invited to all requirements gathering sessions, and other members of the development team (such as the BA, SA, and PM) should be invited to design reviews. This allows other members of the team to ask questions, pose potential challenges to the solution, and ensure all business/technical requirements are accounted for in the design.
3) Encourage rapid iteration.
Not every page or piece of functionality requirements a slick prototype. Familiarize yourself with the differences between sketches, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes. Encourage your designers to sketch ideas and wireframe as much as possible—this will allow them to rapidly iterate on possible solutions and get client buy-in before they commit a lot of time to creating mockups and prototypes.
I can’t tell you the amount of times that I’ve jumped on a quick five-minute call with a developer or analyst to hash out an idea using simple boxes, lines, and short text. Of course, would I prefer designing a full-blown mockup? Yes. But can throwing together a quick diagram in Miro also be just as effective? Yes.
4) Implement UX reviews in your development process.
If your client signs off on a mockup, your development team is beholden to that design. Implement UX reviews after a story or piece of functionality has been developed; it’s much easier to tweak a bit of CSS a sprint or two into the project than to make dramatic changes before UAT.
5) Standardize what you ask for in user stories.
User writing is unique to each person and project, but there are things you can always account for having: navigation, heading styles, typography, links, buttons, widget headers and wrappers, forms, etc. Articulating and standardizing these in a KB or “checklist” can ensure that’s one less piece of information your designer has to hunt down—and it reduces the cognitive load of everyone involved. Win, win!
In conclusion
The best way to integrate your designers into your agile process is to JUST START. While it may burn through more client billing time, including your designers into your development cycle leads to better-designed products that meet both business and user needs more effectively. And when your developers and project teams are also included in the design process, it leads to less miscommunication, more rapid iteration, and a more innovative team. Clarifying differences in levels of fidelity and standardizing what is asked for in user stories allows your designers to hit the ground running. By prioritizing these five strategies, you’re giving your teams the tools they need to design and build even more useful, innovative, and satisfying solutions for your products and clients!