User Interface Design and Agility

Abstract

Today's Computer Science (CS) students may not give enough attention for the importance of the User Interfaces (UIs) they design for class projects, which becomes even more critical when they design for mobile applications. They also lack the required organization skills that help them manage how they work together. Although agile methods proponents and UI experts follow different guidelines for each to achieve their goals, integrating agile and UI design practices seems to be a promising combination that can help CS students (and developers in general) to better design for various mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, smart watches etc.) as well as to follow a semi-structured development approach to help them manage their programming work. Our research is concerned with studying the various approaches that can be used to combine agile practices with UI design guidelines for designing mobile applications. We are designing a framework that uses Pair Programming (PP) -- as an agile practice to guide the mobile UI design and application development processes. Unlike the previous studies that applied agile methods in classrooms, we are concerned with the special requirements of mobile devices as well as the regular development tasks. Moreover, we are focusing on applying certain practices that we believe to be easier to follow than the broader agile guidelines. Our current work aims at providing CS educators with a new adaptive teaching approach that is more student-oriented instead of the traditional task assignment approaches. Our research will then be extended to include teams from software development companies that are working on mobile application development. We believe that our practice-oriented framework that integrates agile with mobile UI design and development practices has much to do with industry as well as classrooms.