Design Iteration

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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

Make learning as easy as watching Netflix: Learn more about Design Iteration by taking the online IxDF Course Agile Methods for UX Design.

Why? Because design skills make you valuable. In any job. Any industry.

In This Course, You'll

  • Get excited when you discover that agile isn't just about speed; it's about clarity, confidence, and doing work that delivers better results faster. As AI reshapes how teams work, you stay in demand when you can use timeless human-centered design skills to bring clarity and direction to fast decisions and keep projects focused on real human needs. Agile skills help you stay competitive in any job and across all industries. Today, 95% of organizations use Agile development methods to quickly adapt and avoid delays, bottlenecks, and costly failures in the design and development process.

  • Make yourself invaluable with the high-demand skills that companies are looking for. Agile methodologies often top job requirement lists because they help teams deliver more value in less time. Agile empowers you to feel in control, make faster, smarter decisions, and do meaningful work without burning out. Whether you're in User Experience (UX) Design, marketing, or management, this course will give you the skills you need to find solutions in less time and drive business success with higher-quality deliverables. You'll improve communication with developers, product managers, and other stakeholders, breaking down silos for a more collaborative team dynamic. You'll learn the secret to navigating different Agile environments with ease and experience the satisfaction of real progress.

  • Gain confidence and credibility as you get hands-on with proven techniques like continuous discovery, Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), and design slicing. It's easier than you think! No matter your background, you can easily learn to master Agile Methods for UX Design. You'll get comfortable with Agile patterns and anti-patterns and learn how to tailor your design and research to different teams. With step-by-step guidance and downloadable resources like the glossary of Agile terms and the product roadmap, you'll have everything you need to excel in any Agile environment. 

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All Free IxDF Articles on Design Iteration

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Stage 4 in the Design Thinking Process: Prototype - Article hero image
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Stage 4 in the Design Thinking Process: Prototype

One of the best ways to gain insights in a Design Thinking process is to carry out some form of prototyping. This method involves producing an early, inexpensive, and scaled down version of the product in order to reveal any problems with the current design. Prototyping offers designers the opportun

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How to Succeed as a Designer on Agile Teams: Embrace Imperfection - Article hero image
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How to Succeed as a Designer on Agile Teams: Embrace Imperfection

An agile team values shipping working software in order to gain customer feedback and respond to it. This emphasis on shipping working software, combined with short timelines to ship it in, often only a week or two, puts excessive pressure on designers to deliver designs to engineers in unrealistic

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How to Get Meaningful Design Feedback from Your Clients - Article hero image
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How to Get Meaningful Design Feedback from Your Clients

Meaningful design feedback is essential to the collaborative and iterative design process, and it’s equally important for UX/UI designers, graphic designers, product managers and most creative professionals. However, getting design feedback from clients can be one of the most painful aspects of the

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The Journey of the UX Design Process in VR - Article hero image
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The Journey of the UX Design Process in VR

VR’s design process isn’t that far off from a typical user-centered design approach. It’s all about continuous discovery and iterative improvements. Here you’ll discover the key stages of the design process, how to define, make and learn, so that you can create successful experiences from the get-go

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How to Succeed as a Designer on Agile Teams: Embrace Imperfection

How to Succeed as a Designer on Agile Teams: Embrace Imperfection

An agile team values shipping working software in order to gain customer feedback and respond to it. This emphasis on shipping working software, combined with short timelines to ship it in, often only a week or two, puts excessive pressure on designers to deliver designs to engineers in unrealistic time frames. How can a designer survive, let alone succeed in such a team? The key lies in a shift in mindset — to embrace imperfection. Let’s see why.

One of the biggest challenges facing UX designers in agile teams is time. If you feel that it is unrealistic to deliver polished designs within a week, then you’re right! It may not be possible to churn out pixel-perfect mockups at speed, all the time. And it is this expectation that often burns out designers. But it needn’t be this way. Agile teams function in a fundamentally different way than a design agency, and so, as a designer, you must adapt your work accordingly. This doesn’t mean skipping research or getting burned out in handing over polished assets. It’s somewhere in between — letting go of “perfection,” especially when it comes to mockups and functional prototypes.

Every professional strives to put their best foot forward, and designers are no exception. However, agile teams are not great places to be perfectionists, partly because there isn’t much time for it, but mostly because we rarely know what makes something perfect. And, what designers think of as “perfect” is almost never the same as what a user would consider “perfect.”

Instead of aiming for some nebulous version of a perfect design, aim for getting things good enough to learn from and iterate.

In this video, Laura Klein uses the analogy of a familiar household activity to explain how you can train yourself to think in terms of good enough, instead of “perfect.”

Transcript

The Take Away

Teams that can learn from user feedback and iterate on features tend to stress less about making a product “perfect” before it gets released. They know that, as long as it’s good enough, solves a user problem, and can be learned from, they can go back and make it better later. 

Unfortunately, a lot of teams that call themselves agile don’t ever go back and iterate, which makes this a tricky thing to implement. Work with your team to find out what “good enough” means for any given feature and then commit to going back and improving it once you have a better idea of what “perfect” looks like. You may still never make it perfect, but at least you won’t waste a lot of time adding things that make the product worse!

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© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0

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