Integrating User eXperience Principles and Practices into Software Development Organizations: An Empirical Investigation

Background: To be effective, User eXperience (UX) principles and practices need to be integrated into development processes and organizations, what we refer to as UX integration. However, software companies often face various challenges that hinder a successful UX integration. Objective: The aim of this thesis is to facilitate and improve the current state of UX integration in the software industry. To that end, we present an empirical investigation of current UX integration challenges and success factors and analyze them in relation to other software quality characteristics, in particular, usability. Method: We performed a series of studies, mainly in the Swedish software industry and applied a variety of methods including interviews, observations, and workshops. We used Grounded Theory (GT) and thematic analysis to drive our data gathering and to analyze our data. Results: We showed that UX integration challenges and success factors are both technical and organizational, however, they mainly belong to the latter category. We found that various decisions that are made outside the authority of UX practitioners have an inevitable impact on enabling or prohibiting UX integration and that the integration is influenced by various changes that organizations undergo over time as well as planned UX initiatives. Our findings underline the similarities between UX integration and organizational change, in general, and Software Process Improvement (SPI) in particular. We also found that the known unique characteristics of UX (subjective, holistic, dynamic, context-dependent, and worthwhile) have implications not only for the day-to-day work of practitioners but also for UX integration. Based on our findings, we propose various UX integration principles and practices to help software companies in their integration efforts. Conclusion: We argue that to prevent a lopsided focus on the pragmatic aspect of UX in the software industry, software practitioners and researchers should explicitly differentiate between UX and other software quality characteristics, in particular, usability and address the unique characteristics of UX in their work. In addition, they should apply the existing body of knowledge in the two fields of organizational change and SPI especially to address the organizational issues concerning UX integration. Although our focus has been on UX, our findings also may shed light on integrating other multidisciplinary and emerging concepts into the complex context of software organizations

A systematic mapping study of HCI practice research

Human–computer interaction (HCI) practice has emerged as a research domain in the HCI field and is growing. The need to transfer HCI practices to the industry began significantly with the works of Nielsen on usability engineering. To date, methods and techniques for designing, evaluating, and implementing interactive systems for human use have continued to emerge. It is, therefore, justified to conduct a systematic mapping study to determine the landscape of HCI practice research. A Systematic Mapping Study method was used to map 142 studies according to research type, topic, and contribution. These were then analyzed to determine an overview of HCI practice research. The objective was to analyze studies on HCI practice and present prominent issues that characterize the HCI practice research landscape. Second, to identify pressing challenges regarding HCI practices in software/systems development companies. The results show that HCI practice research has steadily increased since 2012. The majority of the studies explored focused on evaluation research that largely contributed to the evaluation methods or processes. Most of the studies were on design tools and techniques, design methods and contexts, design work and organizational culture, and collaboration and team communication. Interviews, case studies, and survey methods have been prominently used as research methods. HCI techniques are mostly used during the initial phase of development and during evaluation. HCI practice challenges in companies are mostly process-related and on performance of usability and user experience activities. The major challenge seems to be to find a way to collect and incorporate user feedback in a timely manner, especially in agile processes. There are areas identified in this study as needing more research

Design value journey – O valor, criação e gestão de um departamento de design de experiência numa organização orientada à engenharia

A expansão do design de experiência tem levado empresas não orientadas ao design, a formarem equipas internas de designers para responder às necessidades dos seus clientes, nomeadamente grandes organizações de engenharia. Apesar do seu crescimento, o valor do design continua a ser difícil de ser entendido e encontra alguns obstáculos na sua criação e gestão. Nesse sentido, a presente investigação, baseia-se num caso de estudo, entrevistas e questionários realizados numa empresa de consultoria de engenharia, e procura analisar o valor do design percecionado pelas equipas de engenharia, bem como, consolidar e estruturar o conhecimento adquirido na criação e gestão de uma equipa de design numa organização desta natureza. O estudo permitiu concluir que, existe pouco investimento tanto financeiro, como estratégico para promover as práticas e gestão de design e consequentemente o valor gerado pela colaboração entre as equipas. A comunicação é apontada como uma barreira, que poderá ser derrubada com uma colaboração mais próxima entre as equipas e pela divulgação de casos de sucesso pela organização.The expansion of experience design has led non-design-oriented companies to form in-house designers’ teams to respond to the needs of their customers, namely large engineering organizations. Despite its growth, the value of design remains difficult to understand and faces some obstacles in its creation and management. In that way, the present investigation is based on a case study, interviews and questionnaires carried out in an engineering consulting company and seeks to analyze the value of design perceived by engineering teams, as well as to consolidate and structure the knowledge acquired in creating and management of a design team in an organization of this nature. The study allowed us to conclude that there is short investment, both financial and strategic, to promote design practices and management and consequently the value generated by collaboration between teams. Communication is seen as a barrier, which can be broken down with closer collaboration between teams and the dissemination of success stories by the organization