Tina Øvad

The Prevalence of UX Design in Agile Development Processes in Industry

The gap between how the academic world develops usability and user experience (UX) methods, and how the industry employs these methods is perceived as both broad and deep. But is that the real picture -- and has there been a change in how companies work within these fields over the past two years? By conducting interviews with eight companies, this paper tries to answer these two questions. The companies were initially interviewed in 2013 and by follow-up interviews in 2015 the paper draws a picture of how the companies work with UX and usability in an agile development environment. We identify the challenges they are facing and if, and how the work progresses. We found that the UX maturity during these two years had changed significantly. This was revealed by the fact that almost all of the companies in 2015 had implemented or were in the process of developing a UX strategy together with more formalized UX processes. They also allocated more resources to conduct UX and usability work than earlier. We found that all of the companies made use of low-fi prototyping, followed by usability testing, workshops, personas, expert evaluations, user or customer journeys, customer visits and user task analyses. Almost all the companies carried out development using the Scrum framework. All of the companies were interested in the idea of agile UX, and found the idea of using the developers as a UX resource interesting. This, together with an idea of modifying existing usability methods to be used in an agile, industrial setting could be a solution to bridge the gap between academia and the industry.

How to reduce the UX bottleneck – train your software developers

ABSTRACT Usability and user experience (UX) methods come from academic environments, where industrial conditions such as time and resources are not of prime importance. Furthermore, usability and UX methods originate from a time when almost all software developments followed a traditional approach, such as the waterfall model. These two facts entail that existing methods often are too resource demanding and complex to apply directly into today’s agile, industrial environments. In this paper we make the claim that methods must be updated and tailored in order to be applicable within the agile, industrial development framework of today. We pursue a solution to simplify well-known methods and to train software developers to perform the UX work. To do this, three methods are modified via an iterative process together with the development of supporting materials. Software developers in three companies are trained in the methods to assess the approach. We find that it indeed is feasible to update and tailor existing usability and UX methods to fit into an agile, industrial environment. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to train developers to perform the usability and UX methods via one-day, in-situ sessions using an ‘instructor’-teaching approach. The training is based on hands-on exercises and real-life tasks. This further boosts the developers’ confidence in performing UX work and promises a better consideration of UX in the development phases. We evaluate our approach through observations of the developers performing the UX tasks on their own at a later point in time.

Templates: A Key to Success When Training Developers to Perform UX Tasks

Working with usability and UX design in an agile development context such as Scrum has been found challenging. Not all companies have the need or resources for a team of dedicated UX specialists. In other cases the UX team is perceived as a bottleneck. We therefore set out to investigate; how companies can perform UX tasks, when no or little UX expertise exists in the organization; if it is possible to perform this work in line with the Scrum sprints and how such work should be facilitated. To do this and since the Scrum framework states that every team member should be able to perform every work task, we trained software developers in three different companies to perform certain selected UX methods. The training was done as 1-day training sessions. The developers were provided with materials describing UX methods modified to be used in an agile, industrial environment. These consisted of guidelines, templates and cheat sheets. These materials were refined throughout the training sessions based on observations and feedback from the developers. We found that especially the templates were highly valued by the developers. The templates provided a quick overview of the method, guided them in the work and gave them security and confidence in conducting this type of work independently of the researchers. The templates described in the paper have been made publicly available and may be used freely.

Optimizing web-accessibility for deaf people and the hearing impaired utilizing a sign language dictionary embedded in a browser

Abstract Deaf people have certain problems navigating on the Internet. This is a subject, which has not received adequate scientific attention. Via an experiment with both deaf and hearing people, text was identified as a problem for deaf people when navigating on websites. A prototype of a website with an embedded sign language dictionary, which translates keywords to sign language, was developed and tested against the same website without the dictionary. This test revealed that deaf people who were given the sign language prototype completed a given task significantly faster than deaf people who were given the website without the dictionary. A final test showed that deaf and hearing people use the same number of metacognitive comprehension strategies when reading on websites, but the frequency of their usage was different. Deaf people make more use of a search and match strategy, which is a behavior this prototype supports.