The Contemporary Understanding of User Experience in Practice

User Experience (UX) has been a buzzword in agile literature in recent years. However, often UX remains as a vague concept and it may be hard to understand the very nature of it in the context of agile software development. This paper explores the multifaceted UX literature, emphasizes the multi-dimensional nature of the concept and organizes the current state-of-the-art knowledge. As a starting point to better understand the contemporary meaning of UX assigned by practitioners, we selected four UX blogs and performed an analysis using a framework derived from the literature review. The preliminary results show that the practitioners more often focus on interaction between product and user and view UX from design perspective predominantly. While the economical perspective receives little attention in literature, it is evident in practitioners writings. Our study opens up a promising line of request of the contemporary meaning of UX in practice.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 3 table

Requirements engineering related usability techniques adopted in agile development processes

Over the last decade there has been a growing interest in the integration of agile software development process (ASDP) and user-centred design (UCD). However, there are no papers that study which usability techniques related to requirements engineering are being adopted in the ASDP, and there are no formalized proposals for their adoption. Objective: Identify which techniques related to requirements engineering activities are being adopted in the ASDP and determine how they are being adopted. Method: We have conducted a systematic mapping study (SMS) to retrieve the literature reporting the application of usability techniques in the ASDP. We analysed these techniques using a catalogue of techniques compiled by software engineering researchers. We then determined the manner in which the techniques that are being used in the ASDP were adopted. Results: The agile community is very much interested in adopting usability techniques. The most used techniques are Personas, contextual inquiry and prototyping. Conclusions: This research offers an overview of the adoption of usability techniques related to requirements engineering in ASDPs and reports how they are being adopted. We found that some of the techniques are being adapted for adoption.This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports FLEXOR and “Realizando Experimentos en la Industria del Software: Comprensión del Paso de Laboratorio a la Realidad” projects (TIN2014-52129-R and TIN2014-60490-P, respectively) and the eMadrid-CM “Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías Educativas en la Comunidad de Madrid” project (S2013/ICE-2715

UX design in agile: a DSDM case study

Integrating User Experience (UX) design with agile development continues to be the subject of academic studies and practitioner discussions. Most of the existing literature focuses on SCRUM and XP, but in this paper we investigate a technical company who use DSDM. Unlike other agile methods, DSDM provides a configurable framework and a set of roles that covers the whole software development process. While elements of the UX design integration experience were similar to those reported with other agile methods, working practices to mitigate the challenges were identified using DSDM’s standard elements. Specifically, communication challenges were mitigated by extending two of DSDM’s standard roles. In addition, a change of focus between a design-led phase and a development-led phase of the project changed the communication challenges. Agile teams need to be aware that this change of focus can happen and the implications that it has for their work

Designing for safety and usability: user-centered techniques in medical device design practice

The design of systems affects the likelihood and nature of errors that people might make with them, and the ease of error recovery. If developers are to design systems that are less prone to errors propagating, they need to consider the users and user contexts. There are many techniques and resources available to support developers in this. In this paper we report on an interview study involving professionals from major manufacturers of medical devices, to better understand their development practices and the external forces that shape those practices. This identified barriers to user-centered design and corresponding opportunities for support. Results are divided into four themes. These are: collaborative working practices; understanding the user and their situation; providing adequate justification for the adoption of a user-centered approach; and the provision of clear guidance and support. Our findings highlight the importance of ensuring that techniques are adequately justified, applied at the correct time, aligned with the development lifecycle and easy to adopt

Development of a Shared UX Vision Based on UX Factors Ascertained Through Attribution

User experience (UX) is an important quality in differentiating products. For a product team, it is a challenge to develop a good positive user experience. A common UX vision for the product team supports the team in making goal-oriented decisions regarding the user experience. This paper presents an approach to developing a shared UX vision. This UX vision is developed by the product team while a collaborative session. To validate our approach, we conducted a first validation study. In this study, we conducted a collaborative session with two groups and a total of 37 participants. The group of participants comprised product managers, UX designers and comparable professional profiles. At the end of the collaborative session, participants had to fill out a questionnaire. Through questions and observations, we identified ten good practices and four bad practices in the application of our approach to developing a UX vision. The top 3 good practices mentioned by the participants include the definition of decision-making procedures (G1), determining the UX vision with the team (G2), and using general factors of the UX as a basis (G3). The top 3 bad practices are: providing too little time for the development of the UX vision (B1), not providing clear cluster designations (B2) and working without user data (B3). The results show that the present approach for developing a UX vision helps to promote a shared understanding of the intended UX in a quickly and simply way

WHY WE SHOULD TALK? THE POTENTIALS OF COMMUNITY DIALOG IN GROUNDING AN INTEGRATED RURAL DEVELOPMENT

Rural development is a social process. It involves local community in all stages of development. Community dialog is a means for facilitating community involvement in determining a development direction, potential development plan and development sus-tainability in the future. Frequently, local community is considered as the development target. This position puts them just being development watchers, spectators, silent and passive recipients. Moreover, these silent roles make them remain unempowered since they do not know how to determine their future, how to take part in collective decision and feel being neglected. This study examines potentials of community involvement in dialog. A qualitative research paradigm is adopted. The data are collected byrecording, transcribing and analyzing community dialog at Klagen, Nganjuk, Jawa Timur.  The study finds that community dialog offers considerable potentials. The first potential of community dialog is generating local community commitment, awareness, sense of belongingness and supportive character to build their own homeland. These positive development psychological states,characters and ethos are soft human dimensions which can be critical drivers in rural development. The second is creation of local knowledge and scientific knowledge joint enabling innovation and collective learning process. This joint-knowledge allows the combination of local wisdom and scientific insight. The third is building shared or collective development vision and plan. This plan and vision allow the development prioritizing process and development of rural strength, potential competitive advantage and resource building. The fourth is expanding rural networking and exercising rural people capacity to build wider internal and external social relationship.