Agile Design

Lot of work load in last few months refrained me from blogging.
However the work I was doing was fascinating from learning point of view.
Design as such requires time to evolve. You need to go through iterations for the evolution of close to perfect design.
Agile is the a project management for Software development lifecycle wherein all the stakeholders of a project work hand in hand, updating each other everyday and hence leveraging the product development. This helps keep everybody involved and influenced on the same track.

So how does design get impacted by Agile methodology?

Well it doesn't get much impacted but influenced by engineering/developers who want to finish off their tasks as soon as possible. However this methodology does give designers a great opportunity to listen to what developers have to say about users and product usage scenarios and also listen to end customer goals. This allows designers to quickly make changes, rather than iterating on concepts in the cube without customers/users input. You might say that this takes away designers "big" time to bring innovation in the product. But then playing devils advocate I would say that it allows you to quickly test your concepts with the users rather than doing all at once then going to user just to find out that your design doesn't fit the context. This is especially true when you are designing for enterprise products and you have to cater to group of users of having similar professional persona.

So in nutshell Agile has its own advantages and disadvantages for a designer. But it closely gels with the Design process and hence fruitful for the team as a whole.