Jennifer Ferreira

User experience design and agile development: managing cooperation through articulation work

Previous discussions of how User Experience (UX) designers and Agile developers can work together have focused on bringing the disciplines together by merging their processes or adopting specific techniques. This paper reports in detail on one observational study of a mature Scrum team in a large organization, and their interactions with the UX designers working on the same project. The evidence from our study shows that Agile development and UX design practice is not explained by rationalized accounts dealing with processes or techniques. Instead, understanding practice requires examining the wider organizational setting in which the Agile developers and UX designers are embedded. Our account focuses on the situatedness of the work by making reference to values and assumptions in the organizational setting, and the consequences that those values and assumptions had for practice. In this organizational setting, cooperation between the Agile developers and UX designers was achieved through ongoing articulation work by the developers, who were compelled to engage a culturally distinct UX design division. Based on this study, insights into culture, self‐organization and purposeful work highlight significant implications for practice. Copyright

Agile Development and User Experience Design Integration as an Ongoing Achievement in Practice

Little is known about how Agile developers and UX designers integrate their work on a day-to-day basis. While accounts in the literature attempt to integrate Agile development and UX design by combining their processes and tools, the contradicting claims found in the accounts complicate extracting advice from such accounts. This paper reports on three ethnographically-informed field studies of the day-today practice of developers and designers in organisational settings. Our results show that integration is achieved in practice through (1) mutual awareness, (2) expectations about acceptable behaviour, (3) negotiating progress and (4) engaging with each other. Successful integration relies on practices that support and maintain these four aspects in the day-to-day work of developers and designers.

Values and Assumptions Shaping Agile Development and User Experience Design in Practice

Previous discussions concerned with combining User Experience (UX) design and Agile development have either focused on integrating them as two separate processes, or on incorporating techniques from UX design into an Agile context. There is still no rigorous academic view on the nature of practice in this area. Further, the many and varied settings in which Agile developers and UX designers work together, and how those settings shape their work, remain largely unexplored. We conducted two field studies to address this. The results suggest that the values and assumptions of decision-makers external to the teams shape UX/Agile practice. The current focus on processes and techniques falls short of providing the insight necessary to improve practice. Instead, our results indicate that improvement requires further explication of contextual values.

Agile Testing: Past, Present, and Future -- Charting a Systematic Map of Testing in Agile Software Development

Testing has been a cornerstone of agile software development methodologies since early in the history of the field. However, the terminology used to describe the field - as well as the evidence in existing literature - is largely inconsistent. In order to better structure our understanding of the field and to guide future work, we conducted a systematic mapping of agile testing. We investigated five research questions: which authors are most active in agile testing; what is agile testing used for; what types of paper tend to be published in this field; how do practitioners and academics contribute to research in this field; and what tools are used to conduct agile testing? Of particular interest is our investigation into the source of these publications, which indicates that academics and practitioners focus on different types of publication and, disturbingly, that the number of practitioner papers in the sources we searched is strongly down since 2010.

Usable results from the field of API usability: A systematic mapping and further analysis

Modern software development often involves the use of complex, reusable components called Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Developers use APIs to complete tasks they could not otherwise accomplish in a reasonable time. These components are now vital to mainstream software development. But as APIs have become more important, understanding how to make them more usable is becoming a significant research question. To assess the current state of research in the field, we conducted a systematic mapping. A total of 28 papers were reviewed and categorized based on their research type and on the evaluation method employed by its authors. We extended the analysis of a subset of the papers we reviewed beyond the usual limits of a systematic map in order to more closely examine details of their evaluations - such as their structure and validity - and to summarize their recommendations. Based on these results, common problems in the field are discussed and future research directions are suggested.

Interactive prototyping of tabletop and surface applications

Physically large touch-based devices, such as tabletops, afford numerous innovative interaction possibilities; however, for application development on these devices to be successful, users must be presented with interactions they find natural and easy to learn. User-centered design advocates the use of prototyping to help designers create software that is a better fit with user needs and yet, due to time pressures or inappropriate tool support, prototyping may be considered too costly to do. To address these concerns, we designed ProtoActive, a tool for designing and evaluating multi-touch applications on large surfaces via sketch-based prototypes. Our tool allows designers to define custom gestures and evaluate them without requiring any programming knowledge. The paper presents the results of pilot studies as well as in-the-wild usage of the tool.

Agile Development and UX Design: Towards Understanding Work Cultures to Support Integration

Organisations are investing heavily into enterprise system infrastructure. With a move to agility and Agile software development, there is an increasing need for understanding how Agile developers and User Experience (UX) designers work together in practice. This paper outlines the current approaches to investigating the combination of Agile development and UX design and indicates a direction for future research that could benefit integration across the cross-functional teams required for enterprise software development.

Learning gestures for interacting with low-fidelity prototypes

This paper presents an approach to help designers create their own application-specific gestures and evaluate them in user-studies based on low fidelity prototypes of the application they are designing. In order to learn custom gestures, we developed a machine learning tool that uses an anti-unification algorithm to learn based on samples of the gesture provided by the designer.

Design and Development in the “Agile Room”: Trialing Scrum at a Digital Agency

Scrum was trialed at Cimex — a Digital Media Agency in the UK. Our insights centre in particular around the close interactions between the designers and developer working in the same room, and how the design roles were played out in the Scrum context. The lessons learned from this experience are now presented to our clients as a case study in order to make them more aware of the benefits of running an Agile project. Since this trial, we have adapted our current practice to include more immediate forms of communication. We now have hands-on experience integrating design with Scrum and can say that it was an enjoyable, bonding experience for the team.

A multi-touch approach to control MRI scans: a user-centered study report

This paper reports on a study investigating the usability challenges faced by users of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) tools. In order to understand these problems, observation, shadowing and interviews were conducted with MRI scan users at two centers. After analyzing the collected data, low-fidelity prototypes were created and evaluated. We addressed the usability issues found by proposing a user-friendly and efficient high-fidelity prototype that replaces keyboard and mouse with two multi-touch screens.