At the day job, I am part of a Scrum development project. Within this context, I was searching for practical experience / best practices on how to manage the web design part of a web application.
Before the project started, I asked some people for their advice and googled around. Just like the discussion at Stackoverflow on “How do you apply Scrum to the design part of web development?”, there seemed to be 2 streams of thought:
- Design screens as part of a sprint
- Design screens early on, ideally in the sprint before a function is developed
After a couple of sprints (still in the newbie category), I recommend following the advice given in option 2: Start as early as possible working on your web app design and UI vision. Things like what kind of grid, what basic layout do you want to follow, and what the header and footer, as well as the basic navigation should look like. Design some of the main screens. At the same time, expect that interaction and design changes will occur.
@persillie sent me this useful article. IMHO this is a very good quote on this topic:
Resist the temptation to create the entire design upfront. The design should evolve based on the feedback you receive, and the details are created incrementally as part of the canvas grooming work.