Attractive User Interfaces with Agile Development

Marc McNeill writes that agile methods result in cleaner and more elegant code than waterfall methods, but waterfall methods produce a more attractive and consistent user interface, giving users a more positive impression of your application.

When features of your application are developed iteratively as separate "objects" by different people, the temptation is for a developer to think about what the user interface needs to be for that object, and not how it fits in with the overall experience.

The way I like to approach this would be to make the first feature to be implemented the "user interface", where we can show users things like what the menu structure of your application should look like, and how in general things should work (e.g. should any dialog boxes be complex with lots of information on the same box, or should they be simplified and spread over several dialog boxes).

As new features are developed, developers can use the basic user interface for guidance and to ensure a consistent looking application. If a new feature needs a new dialog box or web form, the developer can look at the basic UI and see how this should be done. This will also mean that anyone writing documentation or producing sales materials can start earlier as the UI is less likely to change.

However, you need to be careful to make sure that users don't see a user interface and conclude your application is almost complete. Careful communication is important.