#25 – UX

Authors comment:

A great Scrum team has a fruitful relationship with their customers and end-users, so they can openly get feedback, discover new features and discuss improvement points for both product and process. However, if there are User Experience-specialized colleagues, either ideally as a part of the team or outside the team and involved as, e.g., a Shared Service, it’s usually beneficial to involve them in both identifying end-user needs as well as designing the solution, especially if there are specific design guides or patterns to follow.

What we should avoid is taking a waterfall approach where the UX-ers on their own identify, design and mock-up exactly how the frontend should look and behave, and then hands it over to the development team. Instead, in the spirit of cross-functionality and as with any other specialized skill set, the ambition should be for the UX-ers to join the teams and share their knowledge and competencies, as well as learn from the other team members. As everything else in agile, this is easier said than done, but an idea is to start small, e.g., by pair programming User Experience work with a non-UX-er.