UX and Design - The Achilles Heel of Agile Web Development

The way most design agencies work is by gathering requirements and delivering a document in the end that specifies the design. The customer then hands over the design specification as a final product to the developers that build the website.

This process constitutes a particular problem when you’re building a CMS. You can’t use a design based on pages. You need a design for components.

Given the complexity of Drupal you usually don’t know upfront exactly what will be needed or build, so much of the time used for generating the design documentation is wasted. In the other hand many of the things you do need designs for have not been thought about or documented in the design process.

As a Drupal consultancy we have encountered the following problems when the design was made beforehand:

• functionality was scoped by the design
• the expectations of the customer was set by the design
• the design was incomplete leaving room for interpretations
• the customers unwilling to go through “yet another” analysis phase
• the design document becomes obsolete

In our talk we will address the problems and tell how we have tried to solve them.

We will give examples on how we uses style guides and how we try to make the designers part of the team. We will also present a succesful case, where the design agency worked with us in an agile process.

The talk will be followed up by a BOF where we would very much like to engage in a conversation about the subject, sharing stories and learnings.