Kati Kuusinen

Agile user experience development in a large software organization: good expertise but limited impact

While Agile methods were originally introduced for small, tightly coupled teams, leaner ways of working are becoming a practical method to run entire enterprises. As the emphasis of user experience work has inherently been on the early phases before starting the development, it also needs to be adapted to the Agile way of working. To improve the current practices in Agile user experience work, we determined the present state of a multi-continental software development organization that already had a functioning user experience team. In this paper, we describe the most prevalent issues regarding the interaction of user experience design and software development activities, and suggest improvements to fix those. Most of the observed problems were related to communication issues and to the service mode of the user experience team. The user experience team was operating between management and development organizations trying to adapt to the dissimilar practices of both the disciplines.

How to make agile UX work more efficient: management and sales perspectives

Many companies have been conducting their software development activities using Agile methods for years; however, in many cases the management and sales processes of these companies are still run in a more traditional way. This can cause clashes between development and management; and especially in terms of user experience specialists, who are often operating in between these organizations. This paper describes the present state of user experience work in development and sales processes in a large, globally-operating IT service company. The data were gathered via an online survey (with 67 respondents) and 17 theme interviews. The study indicates that although the user experience approach is well established inside the organization, the impact of this approach is limited by mismatching sales and management practices and processes, which are, in many cases, working in more traditional ways. In specific, the business model in sales was seen to hinder user experience work.

Task Allocation Between UX Specialists and Developers in Agile Software Development Projects

Synchronizing efforts between developers and user experience (UX) specialists is one of the major challenges in agile UX work. In this paper, we report results of a study conducted over a release cycle of six agile software development projects in five companies, considering the task allocation and cooperation in the team. Team members (N = 31), including product owners, UX specialists, and developers, reported weekly on the UX-related tasks they had contributed to and whether the UX specialist had participated. We identified three forms of cooperation: minimal, product owner–UX specialist, and developer–UX specialist. Our study suggests that for projects operating in the minimal cooperation mode, the collaboration concentrates on the user interface (UI) design, while other aspects of UX work are downplayed. At the same time, many UX-related tasks were successfully handled by developers alone. Therefore, to support UX work integration, we suggest a task-oriented integration approach for projects with minimal UX resources.

Designing User Experience for Mobile Apps: Long-Term Product Owner Perspective

The ways people consume content and use applications with different types of devices are fundamentally different. When designing applications for enterprise use, user experience (UX) must typically be addressed during the upfront design of the application. Due to the importance of upfront design regarding UX, the product owner (PO), responsible for the success of the product, must manage UX related tasks. In this paper, we present results of a study on the views of a PO to UX of mobile apps. The study is based on long-term data from three mobile app projects that were supervised by a single PO to reflect how the view evolves over time. As a result, we show that the fashion UX work is included in a project has a significant impact on the outcome and the satisfaction of the PO.

Minimum Viable User EXperience: A Framework for Supporting Product Design in Startups

Startups operate with small resources in time pressure. Thus, building minimal product versions to test and validate ideas has emerged as a way to avoid wasteful creation of complicated products which may be proven unsuccessful in the markets. Often, design of these early product versions needs to be done fast and with little advance information from end-users. In this paper we introduce the Minimum Viable User eXperience (MVUX) that aims at providing users a good enough user experience already in the early, minimal versions of the product. MVUX enables communication of the envisioned product value, gathering of meaningful feedback, and it can promote positive word of mouth. To understand what MVUX consists of, we conducted an interview study with 17 entrepreneurs from 12 small startups. The main elements of MVUX recognized are Attractiveness, Approachability, Professionalism, and Selling the Idea. We present the structured framework and elements’ contributing qualities.

Flow, Intrinsic Motivation, and Developer Experience in Software Engineering

Software developers are both users of development tools but also designers of new software systems. This dual role makes developers special users of work-related software. To increase the understanding of developers as users and to evaluate the ability of common measurement scales to address developer experience, we conducted a survey measuring developers’ flow state, intrinsic motivation and user experience. Scales used were the Short Dispositional Flow Scale, items from the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, the Short AttrakDiff-2, and our own DEXI scale. 57 developers from 25 countries responded and results indicate that intrinsic motivation and autotelic experience are significant predictors of developers’ UX whereas hedonic, pragmatic, and general quality are not. In addition, developers’ needs are characterized by efficiency, informativeness, intuitiveness, and flexibility of the tool.

Designing for presence in social television interaction

In the past years, people have started to use social media to interact actively about TV content. However, despite of over a decade of active research and product development, Social TV has not been adopted by large populations. This paper aims to support designing interaction for Social TV services and, more specifically, designing for the presence and togetherness between viewers. Our constructive research consisted of a series of user studies and iterative prototyping. We conducted user studies with altogether 51 participants both in laboratory and in real-life contexts. To support the presence, the final prototype includes three different modalities of communication -- voice and text-based chat, and animated gestures with avatars. The qualitative findings imply that gestures with avatars in virtual space support Social TV and the experience of presence. Finally, we present an analysis of Social TV heuristics and their validity in the context of our designs.

Improving UX Work in Scrum Development: A Three-Year Follow-Up Study in a Company

This paper presents a three-year follow-up study considering the improvement process of user experience work in a software company utilizing Scrum. Problems encountered in the organization included managing the product vision, timing of UX, lack of cooperation among disciplines, and understanding user needs. We also observed changes in the organization over two years. They included ceasing the centralized UX team and dividing the UX specialists over business lines. UX specialists were given influential roles in regard to product decisions --- such as nominated as product owners.

Towards Understanding How Agile Teams Predict User Experience

In this chapter, we compare UX assessments of users and agile team members to learn to what extent developers can predict how users experience (UX) the product the developers are working on, and where user involvement is truly required. We compared UX assessments of agile team members (N = 26) and users (N = 29) of six enterprise applications with statistical tests. Moreover, we analyzed the data with principal component analysis to reveal the main dimensions of UX for enterprise software. Our results confirm prior research findings that agile team members can put themselves in the users’ position when evaluating instrumental aspects of UX of the software they are working on. However, it seems that developers cannot evaluate non-instrumental quality. Therefore, direct user involvement from participation to evaluation or other means to support user empathy in development process is needed. We recommend additional means, such as personas to help agile team members empathize with the users and their needs for non-instrumental qualities of the enterprise software.

Early Product Design in Startups: Towards a UX Strategy

Startups often begin with minimal product versions to test and validate their product ideas as early as possible. Therefore, the first versions of the product need to be able to communicate the product idea to users in order to receive meaningful feedback. However, if user experience UX of the product is poor, users tend to concentrate on the disturbing user interface instead of the actual product idea. Thus, we suggest that startups should have a UX strategy from the beginning in order to understand their goals related to UX at different stages of product maturity. To this end, we conducted an interview study with eight Finland-based startups and 13 participants. Our results contribute towards understanding both needs for early UX design in startups as well as the restrictions for UX work that the scarce resources of startups induce. This work contributes to creating a UX strategy model for startups.