How We Merged Agile and UCD in Enterprise Health Care Software Development

User Centered Design (UCD) has had challenges integrating with agile development in a large corporate environment. I’ve found that this is due to a few things. First, projects often start with both designers and developers trying to begin work at the same time. Second, designers have trouble splitting time between building up the vision and locking down the details needed to implement the product in support of that vision. And third, designers struggle to adopt the agile philosophy because they see it as competitive or conflicting to their UCD training.

In The Definitive Guide to Integrating UX & Agile, UX Pin suggests that the two methods have been considered incompatible because each camp “obsess over the letter rather than the spirit of collaborative product development.” Teams entrench and protect their approach instead of seeking to align and combine.

But if you dig in and try to find the alignment, you can see that they are founded on the same beliefs and leverage the same methods. Both Agile and UCD aim to deliver business value more quickly to the customers they serve. Both rely on customer feedback to drive tighter iteration loops. The main difference is that the 12 principles of agile don’t explicitly call out design as part of the process.