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A book in progress by Anders Ramsay. Publisher: Rosenfeld Media. Anticipated publication date: 2011

While Agile is taking the developer community by storm, User Experience practitioners are struggling to understand how they fit into the Agile universe and how they can take advantage of the powerful ideas that fuel Agile teams. This book will provide a path for design teams in general and User Experience practitioners in particular, helping them transform their practices by applying Agile methods and thinking.

This book will help you learn:

  • How modern agile and iterative methods and UX practices fit together
  • How to integrate your practice into existing Agile teams
  • How to create the right flavor of Agile for your team

“Agile Experience Design” Blog

Why I'm writing a book an Agile Experience Design

For me, the reason why I am writing a book on Agile Experience Design is, at the surface layer, quite simple: Agile is a powerful and efficient way of delivering quality software. For this reason, an increasing number of developers are abandoning traditional methods and instead adopting their Agile counterparts. Many of them are doing so with the guidance of many of the numerous great books on Agile software developement. And yet, if you do a search on Amazon for 'Agile,' you are likely to find approximately zero books written by or from the perspective of user experience design. Clearly, there is a need for a book written from the non-developer perspective.

But at a deeper layer, the reasons are more complex. For one, the idea of merging Agile and user experience is not a process of simple addition; a traditional user experience practitioner would find it challenging indeed to integrate their current way of working into an Agile team, for the simple reason that Agile is a completely different paradigm compared to its waterfall cousin. Like the horse and buggy compared to the automobile, both are means for getting from point A to point B, but the way these paradigms accomplish that goal is fundamentally different.

In other words, applying and integrating the work of designing elegant and eloquent user experiences in an Agile team requires a transformation of our practice, in which the core principles of good design remain, but how they are manifested may shift radically. For example, how we think about and create and deliver documuments, a core aspect of our practice, is likely to be one of the more visible manifestations of this shift.

Another equally important reason why I am writing this book is to strip away some of the myths and misconceptions about Agile, such as the idea that its all about Sprints and Scrums and Burndowns. Those are all valuable and important practices, but Agile is much larger than any one of them. In fact, perhaps the most important goal of this book is to convey the deeper thinking, the Agile Mindset, on which those practices are founded. Armed with that Mindset, my hope is that many in the user experience field will find ways to not just join Agile teams, but to also transform and empower traditional teams from within.

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