The Prevalence of UX Design in Agile Development Processes in Industry

Abstract

The gap between how the academic world develops usability and user experience (UX) methods, and how the industry employs these methods is perceived as both broad and deep. But is that the real picture -and has there been a change in how companies work within these fields over the past two years? By conducting interviews with eight companies, this paper tries to answer these two questions. The companies were initially interviewed in 2013 and by follow-up interviews in 2015 the paper draws a picture of how the companies work with UX and usability in an agile development environment. We identify the challenges they are facing and if, and how the work progresses. We found that the UX maturity during these two years had changed significantly. This was revealed by the fact that almost all of the companies in 2015 had implemented or were in the process of developing a UX strategy together with more formalized UX processes. They also allocated more resources to conduct UX and usability work than earlier. We found that all of the companies made use of low-fi prototyping, followed by usability testing, workshops, personas, expert evaluations, user or customer journeys, customer visits and user task analyses. Almost all the companies carried out development using the Scrum framework. All of the companies were interested in the idea of agile UX, and found the idea of using the developers as a UX resource interesting. This, together with an idea of modifying existing usability methods to be used in an agile, industrial setting could be a solution to bridge the gap between academia and the industry.

Integrating User eXperience practices into software development processes: implications of the UX characteristics

“…The third group of publications on UX challenges have studied both UX and usability without differentiating between them (e.g., in agile development processes [29,9,49], or in software development in general [30,31,32]). For instance, Ardito et al [31] investigated the current practice of UX and usability through a four stage empirical study including an online survey (with 36 participants from Italy, and 39 participants from Denmark), interviews with four practitioners from four different companies, a focus group, and an exploratory study.…”

“…These studies often concern various aspects of UX work, but specifically investigate how the setup in one particular type of software project (agile) facilitates or inhibits the practices. Thirdly, we found studies that claim to investigate UX state of practice, but tend not to differentiate usability and UX and how similarities and differences between these two concepts affect the practice (either in agile development processes [9,29], or in software development in general [30,31,32]). The findings of such studies therefore do not necessarily provide sufficient understanding of UX challenges, since UX practices go beyond usability practices [7,11].…”

Go with the Flow: Accelerated digital design in the age of Post-agility

“…The research conducted in support of this paper, as well as that by Øvad and Larsen (2015) suggests that a blending of agile and design thinking is happening 'on the ground' as organisations concurrently adopt both approaches. However, this combination often creates team conflict (S3 and S5) rather than focus on innovation and value.…”

Inoculating an Agile Company with User-Centred Design: An Empirical Study

“…2] and limited empirical research exists on the topic [4,7]. One of the ways to enact this integration, particularly in the limited-resource context of small enterprises, is "to use the software developers as a UX work resource by enhancing their qualifications within the field of usability and UX" [14], or in other words to train developers on usability techniques. Advantages include "the potential of easing problems regarding the lack of usability specialists in the industry" [5]; the chance for small companies to lessen "the need to staff usability specialists, which cannot be funded" [5]; a good fit with the Agile feature of team members being able to perform every given work task [13].…”