3.6 Phase 4: Support
User experience involvement should not end at a hand-off to the development team. Continuing to participate in the development, deployment and post-delivery support periods is crucial to ensuring the delivered experience matches the delivered designs and meets stakeholder and end-user expectations.
Collaboration with the development team during build helps cover missed edge cases or ambiguous requirements, and ensures that detailed designs are built as specified.
The product ownership team, including the user experience team, should thoroughly test the built capabilities prior to live deployment. The acceptance criteria collected in user stories serve well as an ad hoc test script. Post-launch, conducting acceptance testing with actual end users serves as another validation of the release’s designs as well as research for future iterations or new additional features.