With millions of new platforms and websites is hard for UX Designers to stay current with today’s trends.  There are so many great UX related posts out there  to help you keep up.  I like to present you some of top UX Blogs which I think are the best.  Hope that helps.

http://www.uxbooth.com

http://www.uxmatters.com

http://bokardo.com/

http://designforservice.wordpress.com/

http://www.disambiguity.com/

http://www.everydayux.com/

http://www.graphpaper.com/

http://www.inspireux.com/

http://konigi.com/notebook/latest

http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/

http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/

http://www.experientia.com/blog/

http://uxmagazine.com/

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/

http://www.alistapart.com/

http://www.90percentofeverything.com/

http://52weeksofux.com/

http://littlebigdetails.com

http://www.lukew.com/ff/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

http://adaptivepath.com/ideas/blog

Courtesy to the article found in IBM website about the Agile approach in User Experience and Design.

Agile process is spreading wings to the User Experience Design and UXD professionals are facing this task to adapt their activities and deliverables to an Agile Development Process. Even though Agile Principles and best practises are already familiar to the UXD Professionals, it is a challenge to focus on efficiency and time boxed iterations. While increasing productivity and efficiency all the best practises are targeted are focused on stakeholders and users.

The best practises could be organised as follows

1. User feedback in every iterations
2. Multiple iterations
3. Better understanding of stakeholders and their needs in using products
4. Designing the User Experience

User Feedback in every iterations

User Experience Designers can increase their chances of success by taking along a trusted guide. Continuous user feedback is one of the primary principles of Agile process and improved User Experience Designers skills in user research and evaluation of findings from research. Many UXD teams use stakeholder “proxies” to provide design and development feedback across multiple iterations. Stakeholders often have detailed knowledge of user needs, but they are not a substitute for actual customers and users. All stakeholders in a project should be a major part of the design and development team.

Representatives for actual customers are useful to provide high-level feedback, especially for stakeholders. Representatives can be members of the development team with in-depth customer knowledge, such as user researchers, marketing/sales representatives, technical services teams, support staff, or architects with extensive customer contact. We might be able to identify employees within our organization with roles and goals similar to the customers. Identifying them enable us to gather first approximations or quick validation of design or requirements, but they should never be considered a substitute for users. Preferably in business context all key product design decisions should be validated or tested with representative stakeholders.

Multiple iterations

Agile developments biggest challenges is the time-framed iterations. Repetition of user research, design, and evaluation for each iteration will be a tiresome process. Working on multiple iterations during the same time period is a possible solution. For example an approach of doing design for iteration B while evaluating iteration A and doing user research or developing user stories for iteration C even though a bit complicated especially if you are the only User Experience Designer responsible for User Experience in a project.

Using the initial project start-up time before coding phase begins to do user research and high-level design, even though the design will change a lot over iterations. Communicating this information in the deliverables such as vision document, user journey, personas, use cases is important for the developers to implement the findings in the solutions. These documents are the connection between Software Developers and User Experience designers and communicating the findings from user research effectively to the engineers could increase the chance of developing a product which enhance the user experience. User research and design for a specific iteration should be completed and communicated to the engineers effectively before the actual code development begins. This is also a very good team building process and ensuring the participation of other discipline like UI developers, Product testers will help to understand the user requirement before coding started and enable them to develop a mental model. This is critical for the success of a project by developing a product or a particular feature in a product based on user research findings.

Better understanding of stakeholders and what motivates them to use the product.

It is very critical to understand all the stakeholders for your product: purchasing decision makers, Persons responsible for installing and configuring the product, the users who will ultimately use the product, the team developing the product and it is important to communicate this stakeholder information to everyone on the project team.

User research should include personas, goals, tasks, environment of use, and limitations of the users, and constraints. This information should be communicated in the project plan, personas, and user journeys. Use cases and user stories should be used to describe the overall value of the product, as well as the value of each milestones. Personas can serve as the building blocks for your product to improve usability, integration, and team productivity. For the continues use of user research, it is important to validate each iterations with the target user group to make sure your research findings matches the user requirements and behaviours before proceeding to the next level. So this approach make sure to eliminate the mistakes in the right time to avoid more pain and stress in making more expensive and time consuming changes in the in later stage. So it is important to test the product with users after each iterations to ensure the successful release of product and improved consumability.

Designing the user experience

If there is already an existing user interface architecture from a previous release, or have done the high-level design before, then design can focus on an upcoming iteration. In keeping with the Agile principle of reducing time and waste, prototyping techniques can be used effectively to communicate design, get early user feedback through testing, and reduce development effort. Leverage existing best practices in user interface design through the use of design patterns, widgets, and visual elements such as icons are recommended.

Prototyping is still an important factor in Agile development. Using high-fidelity prototyping for user interactions that are difficult to code or are difficult to evaluate with low-fidelity prototypes. It is important to getting iterative user feedback on designs prior to code development to ensure the development time is well used. Design must be communicated in some form to the development team, and extensive User Interface Specifications are not popular in an Agile development process so consider using prototypes, wireframes, screen captures, or other lightweight design specifications in this process. And it is important to use the daily scrum meetings to communicate the design changes

It is also important to utilize the reusable assets such as design patters, widgets, visual elements like icons, buttons etc and tools as much as possible for consistency and productivity.