It’s like one of those adventure movies where the hero, surrounded by their motley crew of misfit recruits, is looking across the valley at the approaching army, thinking, “What did we get ourselves into?” That’s the sense I get after talking with UX professionals about the challenges their organization faces as they move to Agile development processes.

At first, Agile can feel like a battlefield. It challenges everything we know about how to do a great job of building fabulous designs. And yes, there’s a lot that we need to consider and adjust in how we go about our business. Some might even say one step forward and three steps backwards, as we have to find our place inside the development process all over again.

Yet the move to Agile is quite a gift for UX professionals. Designers love to work inside tight constraints and Agile provides plenty of them. Those constraints mean we can redesign our design process, from the top, in a way that is best suited for this new world. That’s pretty exciting.

In today’s UIEtips, I explore some of this year’s oncoming challenges and emerging opportunities that we’re seeing when integrating a UX process inside Agile development. I think you’ll agree that there’s a lot of exciting opportunities ahead, along with some challenges we can really sink our teeth into.

Read the article: UX and Agile Development: 2012′s Challenges and Opportunities

It was directly with these challenges and opportunities in mind that we designed our 2012 UX Immersion Conference. This first-time event features three full-day workshops by experts Hugh Beyer, Jeff Gothelf, and David McFarland, who will deliver in-depth training to get us ready to handle whatever Agile wants to throw at us. There are still a few special price seats available. Learn more at about UX Immersion 2012.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 at 4:45 pm and is filed under agile, Articles, UX Immersion . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.