Helpful advice if your scrum process is run literally by the book. In my experience, though, I've found that it's very natural to integrate graphic and UX desi

Helpful advice if your scrum process is run literally by the book. In my experience, though, I've found that it's very natural to integrate graphic and UX design into sprints along side programmers. As the Product Owner, my goal has been to keep a rough roadmap of issues and features. I often schedule design or graphic work a sprint or two ahead of when we want development to occur. In this way, the requirements become more fully baked in advance of coding. If design or UX uncovers issues that cannot be solved by the end of the month that's okay. Just reevaluate during sprint review and determine next steps. Usually giving them another sprint provides enough time to figure things out. Another trick is to have developers create a working "wireframe" version of features in the template language. (Think HTML with CSS turned off in your browser.) Then when it's working, hand it off to the designer to make it pretty in the next sprint. Doesn't work for every feature, but small to medium sized ones can benefit from this. This also provides a good way to handle scheduling contention so that the designer doesn't have to handle every issue before developers do. Your milage may vary, but I've have 95%+ success with this technique.