User-centered design (UCD) requires some upfront work to discover what your target users do now so the new software you develop will fit with their natural working environment and ways of doing things. Performing significant amounts of upfront work is counter to strict Agile procedures.

The article Agile User Interface Development by Dave Churchville on the InfoQ website does a good job of describing the tradeoffs between UCD and Agile development.

The bottom line is an initial iteration to focus on user interface design is perfectly acceptable. The article mentions several techniques you can use to define your user interface such as paper prototyping, wireframing, HTML and even Visual Studio (when the end result is a .NET application).

A weakness of wireframing is it gives you sketches of your application screens but misses the sequence of how those screens are used to achieve a goal with your application (like in use cases).

Of these techniques, I like using an HTML editor the best. It enables you to define the screens and then link them together to create what I call am illustrated use case. That will show your prospective users (and global software developers) not just what each screen looks like, but also how they interact to form the complete application.

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