Effective UI

Chapter 8. The Iterative Development Process

Though the iterative development process gets only one chapter in this book, it should represent the majority of your project’s work, budget, and lifecycle. The business planning, user research, and initial product architecture stages give a broad-strokes view of the solution, and the development stage is where the understanding of the problem and its solution is deepened, refined, and finally implemented. Entering the development process, you should have answers to the foundational questions that are the high-level absolutes for the product, but every other question remains to be answered. The development stage is the time where the team does the greatest measure of investigation of the problem and its solution; in other words, most of the project’s design work occurs during development. The development stage is also the time when all of the unknowns finally surface, to which you must quickly and flexibly respond. Through the preceding chapters, we’ve encouraged you to exercise restraint in the early planning and architecture of the product. In development, that restraint pays off. Having more room for all of the design work involved in development makes it easier to deliver a complete and high-quality product.

Remember that for UX-focused ...