Agile thinking for UX designers

Agile-minded designers treat design as a collaborative, evolving process that's tightly integrated with development. This represents a shift from designing everything up front to co-creating iteratively.

What agile designers practice in their work:

• Working alongside developers during sprints
• Using design sprints and rapid prototyping to validate ideas quickly
• Valuing user feedback over design perfection.
• Iterating based on what the team and users learn.

This collaborative approach rejects the idea of handoffs between team members. Rather than creating comprehensive deliverables in isolation, designers work iteratively alongside developers and product managers. They understand that design decisions represent hypotheses that need testing with users. This requires flexibility about fidelity, creating high-definition mockups only when the additional detail adds value to the learning process. For designers in software companies, this means they should never operate like an agency separated from product and development teams.