User Experience Design and Agile Development: From Theory to Practice

Tiago Silva da Silva, Milene Selbach Silveira, Frank Maurer, Theodore Hellmann

CPSC, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.
FACIN, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
ICMC, Universidade de S?o Paulo, Campus de S?o Carlos, Lorena, Brazil.

DOI: 10.4236/jsea.2012.510087                

Abstract

We used existing studies on the integration of user experience design and agile methods as a basis to develop a framework for integrating UX and Agile. We performed a field study in an ongoing project of a medium-sized company in order to check if the proposed framework fits in the real world, and how some aspects of the integration of UX and Agile work in a real project. This led us to some conclusions situating contributions from practice to theory and back again. The framework is briefly described in this paper and consists of a set of practices, artifacts, and techniques derived from the literature. By combining theory and practice we were able to confirm some thoughts and identify some gaps—both in the company process and in our proposed framework—and drive our attention to new issues that need to be addressed. We believe that the most important issues in our case study are: UX designers cannot collaborate closely with developers because UX designers are working on multiple projects and that UX designers cannot work up front because they are too busy with too many projects at the same time.

Keywords

Agile; User Experience; Integration; Framework; Field Study

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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