The usefulness of Usability and User Experience evaluation methods on an e-Learning platform development from a developer's perspective: A case study

The development of a web platform is a complex and interdisciplinary task, where people with different roles such as project manager, designer or developer participate. Different usability and User Experience evaluation methods can be used in each stage of the development life cycle, but not all of them have the same influence in the software development and in the final product or system. This article presents the study of the impact of these methods applied in the context of an e-Learning platform development. The results show that the impact has been strong from a developer's perspective. Developer team members considered that usability and User Experience evaluation allowed them mainly to identify design mistakes, improve the platform's usability and understand the end users and their needs in a better way. Interviews with potential users, clickmaps and scrollmaps were rated as the most useful methods. Finally, these methods were considered unanimously very useful in the context of the entire software development, only comparable to SCRUM meetings and overcoming the rest of involved factors

Understanding software developers’ awareness and knowledge about user experience and usability

This study aimed to understand software developers’ awareness and level of knowledge about user experience and usability. The study also examined software developers’ opinions regarding integrating usability activities into software development processes. Fifty-nine software developers participated to the study. In the first part of the study, data were collected through questionnaire. In the second part of the study, in-depth interviews were conducted with a group of volunteer participants and detailed information was obtained about the topic. Results of the study revealed that majority of the software developers did not have any training related to user experience, usability or human-computer interaction. The majority of the participants consider themselves as the least experienced and uninformed members of a software development project about user experience and usability. The results also revealed that software developers in the study have incomplete and misinformation about user experience and usability.</span

Are software companies aware of UX?

The efforts of addressing user experience (UX) in product development keeps growing, as demonstrated by the proliferation of workshops and conferences bringing together academics and practitioners, who aim at creating interactive software able to satisfy their users. Unfortunately, human-centred design and methods addressing usability and UX are always mentioned in research papers but yet very seldom applied in the current practice of software development in industry. In this paper, some findings of studies we have recently performed with software companies are reported. They show that either companies still neglect usability and UX, or they do not properly address them. Thus, in this workshop that seems to consider UX evaluation as a usual practice and aims to optimize the impact of UX evaluation feedback on software development, our provocative statement is: Are software companies (at least) aware of UX? The studies summarized in this paper show that, in many cases, the answer is NO. We are working to overcome the current situation and the paper concludes by providing some suggestions to fill the gap between research and practice of UX