Two Case Studies of User Experience Design and Agile Development

How can user experience design (UED) practices be leveraged in agile development to improve product usability? UED practices identify the needs and goals of the user through user research and testing. By incorporating UED in agile development, user research and testing can be utilized to prioritize features in the product backlog and to iteratively refine designs to achieve better usability. Furthermore, integrating UED and Agile processes can be accomplished with little or no impact on release schedules. The cases studies presented in this paper describe two examples of UED and agile integration at VeriSign.