Building a Team to Champion User-Centered Design Within an Agile Process

Abstract

The marriage of Agile development processes and User-Centered Design (UCD) has been increasingly attracting interest within the field of software development [1]. Integrating the two can identify the benefits of each in terms of efficient work processes to achieve useful and at the same time usable products as results. While the user-centered design process has a defined structure [2], the understanding of user experience and user interface teams vary significantly across organizations [3]. Similarly, design processes are defined differently per organization without a universal model. For certain teams the User eXperience (UX) team means an entity of all user-related and design-related activities, including user research, benchmarking, creating information architecture, projecting user needs into wireframes, creating user interface visual designs and evaluating with usability testings. Other organizations have differentiated User Research specialists (involved in user insights and usability topics) from User eXperience teams (specified on translating user needs into screens) and User Interface (visual representations of tasks) teams. To our knowledge, very little research has been done regarding such intricacies of team structures when discussing user experience teams in the Agile and UCD integration frameworks. Our paper provides a review of different UI/UX team structures in organizations and their implications in the implementation of projects. With our analysis of different team and role structures we hope to contribute to better understanding of UI/UX teams in design agencies and the influence of this understanding on the success of projects incorporating UCD and agile approaches.