Are User Centred Design (UCD) and Agile processes a ‘half baked’ methodology?

Including UCD into an Agile methodology can be faced with it’s own challenges. The process is fast-paced and can be in danger of becoming internally focused on the team's ideas and creativity. This could results in the neglect of the customers business goals. This means that the UCD team will have to be willing to be flexible with the exploratory methods and be willing to adapt to meet immediate needs or changes that are likely to occur. Many changes are likely to occur in parallel to the development where constant evaluation, modelling, testing, and feeding back proof of concepts to the design/development team will be required e.g. any new functionality that is introduced will have to be outlined and designed against the persona and user tested (low fidelity paper prototyping).
Outside the development process, the usability team can conduct research and get ahead of the remodelling to accumulate user input and workflows for the next stage in the development, which again can be fed back to the design team as soon as possible to keep pace with the development process.

For many organisations, moving from the traditional Waterfall project process to Agile may pose certain challenges to traditional UCD methods such as:
- the difficultly in doing formal usability testing on complete scenarios early because they may not be formulated in their entirety.
- the need to change some of your tool sets and UCD methods for delivering designs to be quicker such as creating lower-fidelity wireframes.
- educating clients who are accustomed to the waterfall process, will find it difficult to accept and signoff what might be perceived to be a ‘half baked’ design.
All these are mitigated by good processes and frequent communication. Again the key is to present information as soon as possible so changes get scheduled into future ‘sprints’.

It is also important to identify ahead of time milestone points where user testing of the prototype product could happen in addition to the technology being used to support it.
If planned correctly it is possible to make sure that the UCD methodologies are part of the Agile development process and support client requirements.