Design Iteration

Your constantly-updated definition of Design Iteration and collection of videos and articles
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What is Design Iteration?

Great designs don't just appear overnight – they take time to get right. UX designers and, in fact, all other kinds of designer know that they don't get one try to make a product the best it can be, it takes many iterations to get the product the way that it best suits the user. Iterative design processes are used across all design disciplines to produce results that count. A UX designer should ensure that they understand how iteration works and how to best use it in their own work.

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Learn More about Design Iteration

Iteration is a common theme in both design thinking and agile methodologies.

For more practical insights on how to incorporate iteration while working on agile teams, take the course, Agile Methods in UX Design.

Learn more about the iterative, non-linear design thinking methodology in the course, Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide.

Literature on Design Iteration

Here’s the entire UX literature on Design Iteration by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Design Iteration

Take a deep dive into Design Iteration with our course Agile Methods for UX Design .

Agile, in one form or another, has taken over the software development world and is poised to move into almost every other industry. The problem is that a lot of teams and organizations that call themselves “agile” don’t seem to have much in common with each other. This can be extremely confusing to a new team member, especially if you’ve previously worked on an “agile” team that had an entirely different definition of “agility”!

Since the release of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, agile methodologies have become almost unrecognizable in many organizations, even as they have become wildly popular. 

To understand the real-world challenges and best practices to work under the constraints of agile teams, we spoke with hundreds of professionals with experience working in agile environments. This research led us to create Agile Methods for UX Design.

In this course, we aim to show you what true agility is and how closely agile methodologies can map to design. You will learn both the theory and the real-world implementation of agile, its different flavors, and how you can work with different versions of agile teams.

You will learn about the key principles of agile, examples of teams that perform all the agile “rituals” but aren’t actually agile, and examples of teams that skip the rituals but actually embody the spirit.

You’ll learn about agile-specific techniques for research and design, such as designing smaller things, practicing continuous discovery, refactoring designs, and iterating.

You will also walk away with practical advice for working better with your team and improving processes at your company so that you can get some of the benefits of real agility.

This course is aimed at people who already know how to design or research (or who want to work with designers and researchers) but who want to learn how to operate better within a specific environment. There are lots of tools designers use within an agile environment that are no different from tools they’d use anywhere else, and we won’t be covering how to use those tools generally, but we will talk about how agile deliverables can differ from those you’d find in a more traditional UX team. 

Your course instructor is product management and user experience design expert, Laura Klein. Laura is the author of Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups and the co-host of the podcast What is Wrong with UX?

With over 20 years of experience in tech, Laura specializes in helping companies innovate responsibly and improve their product development process, and she especially enjoys working with lean startups and agile development teams.

In this course, you will also hear from industry experts Teresa Torres (Product Discovery Coach at Product Talk), Janna Bastow (CEO and Co-founder of ProdPad) and Adam Thomas (product management strategist and consultant).

All open-source articles on Design Iteration

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