User Experience Team Research Articles

Influences of UX factors in the Agile UX context of software startups

Software startups work under uncertain market conditions, constant time pressures, and extremely limited resources. Startup practitioners commonly adopt agile practices and lean development to build and release software quickly. Within this context, User eXperience (UX) work is critical for generating user value and creating a competitive advantage. However, integrating agile and UX remains an open question and little explored in software startups. In this study, we investigate how startup practitioners understand the UX concept and what are the influences of UX factors on the agile context of software startups. To achieve this goal, we surveyed software practitioners from software startups in Brazil. We obtained 97 valid responses from professionals working in different areas, in positions of UX experts, software engineers, and managers. Our findings show that most software startup practitioners understand UX from a perspective that gives value to the user/customer interaction with the product and company, focusing on achieving a good UX. Regarding the influences of UX factors, we found that most selected factors carried the meaning of delivering value to the business and the user for producing successful products. On the other hand, the lack of resources is a factor that significantly hinders UX work in early-stage startups and with small teams. By analyzing our results on four dimensions, covering business & market, product & process, customers & users, and UX work & teams, we provided four takeaways to help practitioners with the adoption of Agile UX in software startups context. • Understanding of UX concept by software startup professionals. • Factors influencing UX work in the agile context of Brazilian software startups. • Reasons for adoption of UX practices in Brazilian software startups. • Factors that hinder UX work in Brazilian software startups. • Takeaways for helping the adoption of Agile UX in software startups.

Perceptual Displays Today & Tomorrow – Evangelism, Productization, and Evaluation

Evolution of displays in various industries such as consumer electronics, aerospace, automotive, gaming and digital signage has been a key factor to engage and satisfy consumers. In this talk, I focus on Automotive market as one of the fastest growing display markets, but most discussed matters are applicable to other display verticals. Perceptual and Immersive display user experience are attracting more manufacturers these days to build products matching the end user’s expectation and needs while interacting with displays such as: perfect visibility in all conditions, personalization, less eye fatigue, seamless interaction - in one word “mimic real world” experience. Hardware and software advancements are critical but not enough to fulfil today’s knowledgeable consumer demands. The User Experience has become one of the highest priorities leading companies to develop dedicated user experience or UX teams to study the need of the end user. Multi-disciplinary teams of experts are built to tackle the UX optimization challenge._x005F_x000D_ _x005F_x000D_ In this talk I will share our experience evangelizing the benefits of Perceptual displays, challenges of such evangelism, productization of it and most importantly measuring the performance of perceptual displays in a comparable way to traditional displays.

Getting real close: What a diary study can do for your library

The Berlin State Library will undergo substantial renovation in the coming years. To integrate the readers’ perspective into the planning process, the library’s user experience team engages in manifold research activities, among them the diary study we present in this article. The study covered fifteen readers, and we designed it to generate information about their activities in the library, their favorite spaces, and their ideas for the future library. The article presents the study’s design and findings, reflects on crucial decisions and practical insights, and concludes with ten questions that might help you avoid some hazards when you think about employing a diary method.

DesignOps in an Academic Library: Reducing Barriers, Improving Efficiency, and Scaling Impact of Design and Research

Magnifying design value and scaling impact are challenging for small user experience and assessment teams at academic libraries. The University of Arizona’s User Experience and Assessment unit is leading three Design Operations initiatives aiming to address these challenges: a participant pool that reduces barriers for recruiting research participants; The UX Cookbook that builds expertise and efficiency; and a research repository that shares findings broadly with the organization. Together these initiatives create better workflows for improving the scale and impact of design and research.

Analysis of Unsatisfying User Experiences and Unmet Psychological Needs for Virtual Reality Exergames Using Deep Learning Approach

The number of consumers playing virtual reality games is booming. To speed up product iteration, the user experience team needs to collect and analyze unsatisfying experiences in time. In this paper, we aim to detect the unsatisfying experiences hidden in online reviews of virtual reality exergames using a deep learning method and find out the unmet psychological needs of users based on self-determination theory. Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification (textCNN) are used in this study to classify online reviews with unsatisfying experiences. For comparison, we set eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) with lexical features as the baseline of machine learning. Term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) is used to extract keywords from every set of classified reviews. The micro-F1 score of textCNN classifier is 90.00, which is better than 82.69 of XGBoost. The top 10 keywords of every set of reviews reflect relevant topics of unmet psychological needs. This paper explores the potential problems causing unsatisfying experiences and unmet psychological needs in virtual reality exergames through text mining and makes a supplement for experimental studies about virtual reality exergames.

Design for How People Think: Using Brain Science to Build Better Products: John Whalen [Book Review

This book provides a useful and practical framework for professional user-experience (UX) teams and students who need to understand how consumers think. It has achieved its purpose in the following ways: educating designers about the Six Minds of Experience Framework; showing researchers how to uncover new insights from customers; and demonstrating how to use the Six Minds of Experience framework to enhance the design for products and services. This book sets itself apart from the other technical communication books that discuss understanding audience experience because the author suggests that UX is multidimensional and multisensory, and that looking at more than one cognitive process will unwrap many more facets of the consumer’s thoughts behind the experience. The book concludes by leaving designers with a thought for the future. The author briefly discusses the history of artificial intelligence (AI) and its current evolutionary stage as Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, etc. He argues that Six Minds can be a framework to explore how machine learning and AI can support humans by augmenting their cognitive abilities. Whether in the workplace or the classroom, this short book will supplement UX designers and technical communication students in exploring what it means to truly know the target audience.

Implementing a transactional design model to ensure the mindful development of public-facing science communication projects

This paper introduces the concept of transactional design---integrating Druschke's "transactional" model of rhetoric and science and Kinsella's model of "public expertise"---to demonstrate how technical communication and user experience (UX) designers and researchers can play an essential role in helping scientists cultivate meaningful relationships with members of the public toward the goal of making scientific content more accessible and actionable. This paper reports on the challenges that arose when a water modeling system built for experts was adapted for a public museum audience. It discusses specific issues the UX team had in contending with outdated "deficit" and "conduit" models of communication when working with scientists to adapt the system; it provides a checklist for steps that technical communication and UX designers and researchers---as those who best understand audiences and work directly with users---can champion the idea of transactional design to setup knowledge-making partnerships toward the co-construction of public-facing scientific communication projects.

The Need for Delight in Weight Loss.

Having reviewed myriad papers and grants in the last 5 years, I can't recall a single instance of reading about enjoyment, delight, or desire. And yet, these are powerful forces in the engagement and adherence we need in order to initiate and sustain health behavior change, particularly in weight management. Self-monitoring is a strong predictor of weight loss success (1). Despite the establishment of a robust set of data supporting this across time and populations, engagement with diet and physical activity tracking tools declines over time in weight loss trials and real-world applications. While this is true of all modalities, new technologies have offered some modest improvements (2). Nevertheless, diet and activity apps, as well as wearables, have failed to become things that the average person can't live without. For most people, the enjoyment is short. These tools are a short-lived novelty, one that quickly becomes something we are “supposed” to check each day, instead of something we do by desire, and thus end up in a drawer (3). Delight remains overlooked and underappreciated in behavior change research. This contrasts starkly with the focus of our friends in the commercial world, who devote enormous resources to hiring and building top notch teams with this sole focus. These wizards of desire and delight are known as the user experience (or UX) team. It is their job to make using software enjoyable. This is not merely about making an app look pretty, though that also seems underappreciated in academic research. Thinking about how people want to engage with us is key to delivering a great user experience. Mobile application abandonment rates have been well documented (4). Yet we have not explored this in detail; the strategy necessary to continue to delight and engage patients may vary by population subgroup, but programs should consider not just use of mobile applications, but also web, email, interactive voice response, and text message, including the ability for participants to engage via multiple modalities and change modality. We also need to understand what people are looking for from our technology. Do they need an app to know that the 10,000 steps showing on their wearable today is more than the 9,000 it showed yesterday? Seems unlikely. Where academic interventions have excelled is in making that data actionable by providing meaningful insights, for example, by identifying that step counts are consistently lowest on Saturdays and working with the user to identify strategies to take more steps on Saturday. Academic interventions have been doing this long before technology made logging step counts easy. Where technology provides opportunity is providing those insights easily, in real time, in a way that the patient couldn't achieve on her own. There is delight in receiving a personalized text message, within 30 seconds of stepping on a connected scale, that provides new insights on behavior changes to support weight loss. Enjoyment matters. We all lead busy lives, so busy that movements are alive encouraging us to “stop glorifying busy.” Behavior change programs must fit into a patient's (or user's) life-flow the same way that health care technology must fit into physician workflow. But it also must delight the patient or user. We must face the reality that we are competing for time and attention in our user's lives. There are a small number of software applications (be they mobile apps or not) that we use each day, some because we have to and some because we want to. Health applications, including those for weight management, more often than not, are competing with the “want to” software for time and attention. We must acknowledge that our patients are like us—they'd rather look at pictures of Steve the Sloth on Instagram than be reminded that they are 500 calories from today's goal (which is really a limit) and it is only 12:30pm. Technology will continue to play a role in weight management, but for it to deliver on outcomes, it must pay attention to the user experience. In this regard, the commercial sector is leaps ahead of academic research. Rather than continuing to operate in parallel, there is enormous opportunity for collaboration. By respecting that each group does things well that the other could learn from, we create the opportunity to truly be transdisciplinary and shift the country's obesity trajectory.

User Feedback at Scale

A strong User Experience (UX) discipline has become a business imperative across commercial industry. Accordingly, Human Factors professionals may be part of UX teams in large organizations designing enterprise systems (business-to-business technologies that serve as corporate back-ends or enabling technologies for other products). These teams integrate user research into their design processes by using methods that are similar to consumer product researchers, but often differ in terms of scope and timeline. This panel aims to share best practices and lessons learned in business-to-business UX by bringing together leaders from different enterprise technology companies. Panelists will discuss (1) logistics of gathering feedback from a limited, sometimes hard to reach group of users, (2) how to gather technical feedback using (sometimes) non-technical researchers, and (3) how to structure a user research team (and their deliverables) to effectively turn that feedback into business direction and product experience feedback within an enterprise technology company.

A Method for Identifying and Evaluating Potential Patient Safety Risks in a Patient-Facing Healthcare Portal

Patient portals help facilitate communication between healthcare providers and patients, and provide a secure method for patients to engage with and manage their healthcare information. However, the potential patient safety risks associated with this relatively new functionality have not been extensively researched. athenahealth’s User Experience and Patient Safety teams collaborated to explore their Patient Portal to identify potential patient safety risks, actionable insights, and opportunities for improvement using data from the athenahealth network. The research method created for this purpose was designed to proactively identify, evaluate, and analyze patient safety risks and to provide insights into how patients use portal information. The results of the evaluation were delivered to the product development team in the form of actionable next steps for mitigating the identified risks.

Usability Testing as a Method to Refine a Health Sciences Library Website

ABSTRACTUser testing, a method of assessing website usability, can be a cost-effective and easily administered process to collect information about a website’s effectiveness. A user experience (UX) team at an academic health sciences library has employed user testing for over three years to help refine the library’s home page. Test methodology used in-person testers using the “think aloud” method to complete tasks on the home page. Review of test results revealed problem areas of the design and redesign; further testing was effective in refining the page. User testing has proved to be a valuable method to engage users and provide feedback to continually improve the library’s home page.

Review of "The user experience team of one: A research and design survival guide by L. Buley" Rosenfeld Media 2013 978-1-933820-18-7.

Review of "The user experience team of one: A research and design survival guide by L. Buley" Rosenfeld Media 2013 978-1-933820-18-7.

Harvesting Innovation in the Industry: Prescriptions for breakthrough products

Innovation is a key element for the future of human factors, both as a discipline and as a professional society. However, formal training of innovation processes is absent from the human factors curriculum. Furthermore, published studies about innovation methodologies in human factors manuscripts are scarce. Consequently, practitioners are relying on their own experience and intuition to introduce novel product development techniques in their organization. Therefore, the goal of this panel is to discuss the innovation techniques that are employed by some of the most innovative companies in the technology domain. Human factors and user experience team leaders will present how they have formulated innovation strategies among team members and their impact on product development.

Information architecture: How to be a user experience team of one

Information architecture: How to be a user experience team of one

Information architecture: Taxarcana and other boons for business

Business is increasingly recognizing the importance of bringing taxonomy and user experience together in projects where (strangely) they might not normally meet. Over the years the IA column has included a fair share of articles treating search, controlled vocabulary building, search engine optimization and associated topics. ASIS&T's Information Architecture Summit (http://www.iasummit.org/) this March hosted numerous presentations and workshops representing the latest taxonomy-related thought and work. From among those presentations we bring you two articles that exemplify the current trends, an understanding of which should make it a bit easier to talk taxonomy in the business setting. Tingting Jiang's and Sherry Koshman's “Exploratory Search in Different Information Architectures” offers cogent observations about exploratory search and better user experience. The authors describe how each of the four major search-result grouping structures calls for a different IA approach. That tagging is one of these four primary organizing strategies reflects a happy shift in present thinking about the role of folksonomy in categorization systems. This article pairs nicely with Gene Smith's “Tagging: Emerging Trends.” His thoughtful and practical article describes how top-down hierarchies and bottom-up user-contributed classification are being structured to work together to achieve a powerful new approach. The IA Summit program this year was filled with engaging, inspiring sessions for IA consultants. For instance, nearly every web design engagement includes an opportunity to redesign web forms. Luke Wroblewski's “The Information Architecture Behind Good Web Forms” outlines a straightforward and highly effective approach for coming up with forms that actually work. Nathan Curtis' “Audiences & Artifacts” takes a step back and considers design documentation from a business point of view. He offers priceless advice on designing deliverables that are both efficient to create and communicate effectively to our varied business audiences. Leah Buley's “How to be a User Experience Team of One” was so popular at the IA Summit that she had to deliver it a second time. Part article and part graphic novel, hers is that perfect blend of philosophy and applicability that IAs love so well. I would like to thank all our contributors and hope that their insight and creativity will be an inspiration for all of us.

Adapting usability investigations for agile user-centered design

When our company chose to adopt an Agile development process for new products, our User Experience Team took the opportunity to adjust, and consequently improve, our user-centered design (UCD) prac...