User Experience Work Research Articles

Investigating UX work in Software Startups: A Survey about Attitudes, Methods, and Key Challenges

User eXperience (UX) work within the software industry entails implementing user-centered practices and techniques to acquire and apply insights about users. Given their challenging context characterized by small teams and limited resources, this application can provide software startups with a competitive edge. Despite a growing interest in this field, the perspectives of startup professionals regarding UX work and the challenges they face remain largely unexplored. This paper seeks to explore the perceptions of startup professionals regarding the usefulness of methods and techniques used in UX work, as well as the moments during user interactions with the product or service when they are applied, alongside the challenges inherent in the startup environment. To achieve this, we conducted a survey involving 90 professionals from software startups in Brazil, employing descriptive and inferential statistical methods for data analysis. Our findings reveal that software startup professionals prioritize understanding user needs, capturing feedback, and conducting user tests in their UX work. Interviews are the most commonly utilized method, although usability testing, competitive analysis, and high-fidelity prototyping are also valued across various stages of startup maturity. Furthermore, UX data is primarily collected during user interactions with the product. Additionally, we identified that specific challenges may have a reciprocal relationship with UX attitudes. These findings underscore the perceived value of UX work among software startup professionals, although perspectives vary depending on the startup's stage.

Towards the UX Support to Software Startups: On the relationship of professional expertise and UX work in the Brazilian scenario

One of the topics that can help startups create a more assertive product is User eXperience (UX). Recent research has dedicated efforts to investigate factors that support and hinder the application of UX practices in software startups. The expertise of the professional who applies UX practices is cited as one of that factors; however, its relationship to the application of practices and challenges remains a topic that needs investigation. This study aims to analyze the relationship between the UX expertise of professionals from Brazilian software startups and UX practices’ application. A survey was conducted with software startups (N = 90). We performed a descriptive analysis to answer the research questions and applied Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to check the relationship between variables. Thus, we verified that most software startups do not have a UX professional, and those who apply UX practices are the CEO or developers. We also found a relationship between challenges related to lack of experience, bias in applying practices, and obtaining valuable results with the lack of a UX professional. Finally, the MCA technique showed that some challenges are independent of professional expertise, such as difficulty identifying users to participate in practices and limited resources.

Entangled collaborations: tensions in cross-disciplinary user experience studies in cyberinfrastructure projects

ABSTRACT Cyberinfrastructure research develops and deploys solutions that benefit cyberinfrastructure and the broader scientific community. Designing novel cyberinfrastructure solutions is inherently complex and requires collaborative relations between heterogeneous scientific stakeholders, governing bodies, and organisations. This study investigated the problems and pitfalls experienced in the cross-disciplinary collaboration of three groups: computer scientists (Group 1), User Experience (UX) researchers (Group 2), and domain scientists (Group 3 – bioinformatics, and health informatics researchers) who worked together to build cyberinfrastructure applications. Using participatory action research (PAR), we studied the dynamics of conducting UX research. The main results indicate four tensions that impacted the collaborative practices of cross-disciplinary groups using UX studies in cyberinfrastructure projects: (1) contradictory views on the quality of prototype development, (2) mental models of the work processes (know how) varied among the different groups (3) clarity of feedback was lacking, and (4) the usability problem was perceived to be with the users. Our results highlight the significance of aligning UX and computer science research goals and actively engaging involved cyberinfrastructure research members to meet user expectations. Findings reveal the nuanced ways in which computer science and UX work processes become entangled during the research process and shape cyberinfrastructure development.

User Experience Research Techniques Facilitate Improvements for Access and Discovery Tools Managed by Technical Services Librarians

A Review of: Hill, K. (2020). Usability beyond the home page: Bringing usability into the technical services workflow. The Serials Librarian, 78 (1–4), 173–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2020.1702857 Objective – To demonstrate how user experience research techniques can be incorporated into technical services work. As proof of this concept, the author describes a case wherein a team of librarians, including one in a technical services role, deployed a user experience study to determine if students were able to successfully use LibGuides and the A-Z Database List to find subject-specific resources. The study also aimed to gauge the potential for several A-Z Database List interface redesign options. Design – A case study of user experience techniques applied to technical services projects, including a classic usability test of existing tools and an A/B/C comparison of potential interface redesigns. Setting – The library at the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG), a public R2 university (doctoral university with high research activity). Subjects – Eleven student participants recruited through convenience sampling. Methods – The research team recruited study participants who were in the library at the time of the study, deselecting students from UNCG’s library school and those who were not currently affiliated with the university through an initial questionnaire. Eleven student participants were ultimately selected and led through a series of tasks related to finding subject-specific databases using the A-Z Database List and LibGuides. After the tasks for the A-Z Database List were completed, students were asked for their impression of two additional database list interfaces. Students were recorded throughout the tasks using the “talk aloud” method to provide researchers with insights on their thought processes and preferences. Following the study, researchers listened to the recordings, coding them as successful or incomplete and noting their observations for use in generalized findings. Main Results – Eight of eleven participants used the library’s main search box to locate a general resource for their major on the library’s homepage. When shown the A-Z Database List, ten out of eleven participants used the list to find a database for their major, while one used the link to “Research guides by subject” from that page. Comparisons of three A-Z Database List interfaces showed that most students preferred the Springshare Content Management System that allowed for filtering by subject area. When asked to find a research guide for their subject or major from the library’s homepage, nine out of eleven students clicked on the link labeled “Research guides by subject.” Starting from their subject guide, ten out of eleven could find a tab listing article databases. Nine participants noted that the number of databases listed on the guides was daunting. Conclusion – Results from the user experience study were used to support a redesign of the A-Z Database List using the Springshare Content Management System. The author regarded the experience as a whole as demonstrating how technical services librarians can become involved in user experience work and incorporate findings from usability studies into their management and design of tools that promote access and discoverability.

What do software startups need from UX work?

Empirical research on software development practices in startups is growing. However, little has been investigated about how User eXperience (UX) work has been carried out in software startups. The primary objective of this paper is to investigate what software startups need from UX work. To achieve this goal, we conducted open-ended interviews and retrospective meetings with 16 software professionals from two software startups in Brazil. We analysed the data qualitatively using different coding approaches: initial coding, focused coding, and theoretical coding. We found 14 UX work-related needs which emerged from the daily practices used for software development in the two startups studied. Based on our findings, we propose an initial theoretical framework that highlights two theoretical themes and four groups underlying the needs identified. Our study reveals several relationships between UX work-related needs which are helpful to understand in order to identify what startups need from UX work in practice and to focus startup teams' efforts on the most urgent needs. As future work, we plan to explore ways in which these needs may be addressed so that UX work may be put into practice in software startups.

Prototype of an App Designed to Support Self-Management for Health Behaviors and Weight in Women Living With Breast Cancer: Qualitative User Experience Study.

Accessible self-management interventions are required to support people living with breast cancer. This was an industry-academic partnership study that aimed to collect qualitative user experience data of a prototype app with built-in peer and coach support designed to support the management of health behaviors and weight in women living with breast cancer. Participants were aged ≥18 years, were diagnosed with breast cancer of any stage within the last 5 years, had completed active treatment, and were prescribed oral hormone therapy. Participants completed demographic surveys and were asked to use the app for 4 weeks. Following this, they took part in in-depth qualitative interviews about their experiences. These were analyzed using thematic analysis. Eight participants (mean age, 45 years; mean time since diagnosis, 32 months) were included. Of the 8 participants, 7 (88%) were white, 6 (75%) had a graduate degree or above, and 6 (75%) had stage I-III breast cancer. Four overarching themes were identified: (1) Support for providing an app earlier in the care pathway; (2) Desire for more weight-focused content tailored to the breast cancer experience; (3) Tracking of health behaviors that are generally popular; and (4) High value of in-app social support. This early user experience work showed that women with breast cancer found an app with integrated social and psychological support appealing to receive support for behavior change and weight management or self-management. However, many features were recommended for further development. This work is the first step in an academic-industry collaboration that would ultimately aim to develop and empirically test a supportive app that could be integrated into the cancer care pathway.

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.

UX work in software startups: A thematic analysis of the literature

Startups are new and fast-growing innovative businesses. These companies also deal with uncertain market conditions and work under constant time and business pressures. Although User Experience (UX) has been widely adopted in the software industry, this has not been a reality in the context of software startups yet. Several factors might influence whether, which, and how UX is adopted by software startups.

UX information in the daily work of an agile team: A distributed cognition analysis

The integration of agile software development and user experience (UX) design has been a topic of investigation for practitioners and researchers for many years, and agile teams have become increasingly aware of the importance of UX design. Most studies have focused so far on the integration of UX theories and methods with agile practices. The objective of this research is to investigate whether and how UX information is embedded in the daily work of an agile team. We conducted an ethnographic study of an agile team based in the UK. We performed a qualitative analysis using different data sources and three complementary analytical lenses: Distributed Cognition of Teamwork, Garrett's set of UX elements and planes, and Hassenzahl's content-oriented model of UX. This combination provided an understanding of the different types of UX information available to the agile team through artefacts and face-to-face meetings, how the information flowed within and around the agile team, and the type of engagement they have with UX information. The findings reveal that: (1) agile team members were consumers of UX information not producers; (2) the most common type of UX information found in the system related to how the user interacts with the product rather than to user goals or needs; (3) information focusing on the user perspective appears in verbal communication rather than being captured in artefacts; and, (4) the flow of UX information around the team is complex. In combination, these factors indicate a potential breakdown in the communication of UX information. We argue that these findings have relevance for other agile teams because the artefacts and methods used by this team are commonly used by other agile teams. To improve the situation, we suggest a number of recommendations to engage agile team members in UX work, and reduce the complexity of UX information flow.

Integrating UX work with agile development through user stories: An action research study in a small software company

The integration of user experience (UX) work with agile software development has been addressed in extensive research of challenges and process models. However, in-depth research of context-specific improvements of this integration with actual UX professionals and agile developers in their actual practice is limited. This study examines how the integration of UX work with agile development can be improved in the context of a small Danish Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. We used the problem- and solution-oriented action research method over 12 months in the company. During this period, we initially carried out extensive participant observations, recorded 32 semi-structured interviews, and finally conducted two improvement iterations with evaluations of their effect on agility. We identified user stories as an essential indicator of UX integration. Verbose user stories imply problems in collaboration and trust, while concise user stories and deliberation improve integration of UX work with agile development. The conclusion is that integrating UX work with agile development in practice is complex, contextualized, and difficult even for only a small part of it. We propose that concise user stories and deliberation can be useful and well-defined focuses for integrating UX work with agile software development without sacrificing their agility.

Uncovering the Mystery of How Users Find and Use eBooks through Guerilla Usability Testing

This case study focuses on user research that was conducted to enhance our users’ ebook discovery experience. We took an outward-facing approach by seeking the users’ perspectives. We wanted to know: How do users find ebooks? How do they perceive multiple records for the same title? Would users find additional metadata useful, such as download availability, file format, and chapter titles? We coordinated guerilla usability testing in our library lobby, inspired by low-overhead, high-impact user experience work at other academic libraries. The resulting data gave us a much-needed new perspective of ebook usage that supplements what we already know from our day-to-day work.

Exploring UX Maturity in Software Development Environments in Saudi Arabia

User experience (UX) design is becoming increasingly crucial for developing successful software today. It can determine whether or not users stay engaged with a product or service. It is, therefore, important that organizations have their users in mind when developing software and that there is a maturity for UX work. However, there are still organizations which do not value UX highly and where UX maturity is low. This paper reported the results of a survey of 75 practitioners working in software-development environments in Saudi Arabia. The survey was conducted in July 2020 and aimed to explore practitioners' perceptions of UX maturity, UX significance, and the challenges that face UX process in software development environments. The results show a higher than expected perception of organizational UX maturity amongst the practitioners surveyed, with the majority considering their organizations to be at an "Integrated phase". The degree of awareness of UX value was also found higher than anticipated. Furthermore, the study reveals important information about the most used UX methods as task analysis, prototyping, and heuristic evaluation. It also shows that UX assessment and user involvement being considered during different stages of product development, particularly in the prototyping phase. The major challenges that face UX process were found to be the need to improve UX consistency and the ability of teams and departments to collaborate.

Integrating User eXperience practices into software development processes: implications of the UX characteristics

User eXperience (UX) is a key factor in the success of software systems. Many software companies face challenges in their work with UX. Existing research does not analyze UX practices and challenges in relation to other software quality characteristics or, in particular, in relation to usability. A better understanding of these challenges can help researchers and practitioners better address them in the future. In this empirical study, we have interviewed 17 practitioners with different backgrounds and occupations from eight software development companies. Their responses are coded, and analyzed with thematic analysis. We report eight themes of challenges that practitioners face in their work with UX. While some of these challenges partly overlap with those reported in existing literature about usability or other software quality characteristics, the participants of our study either view many of the challenges as unique to UX, or more severe in the case of UX. Although at a superficial level challenges of UX and other quality characteristics overlap, we differentiate these challenges at a deeper level through the five main characteristics of UX:subjective,holistic,dynamic,context-dependentandworthwhile. In particular, we identified that these characteristics have at least 20 implications (i.e. additional difficulties) for day-to-day work of practitioners. We found that 11 of these implications have been previously reported in literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, the remaining nine implications are unique to our study. These implications can explain why practitioners perceive the challenges to be more severe than for other quality characteristics. Most importantly, they can explain the industry’s lopsided focus on the pragmatic aspect of UX. Our findings can be useful for researchers in identifying new and industry-relevant research areas and for practitioners to learn from empirically investigated challenges in UX work, and base their improvement efforts on such knowledge. Identifying and investigating the overlaps underlines the importance of these challenges, and can also help finding research areas not only for enhancing UX work but also software quality in general. It also makes it easier for practitioners to spot, better understand as well as find mitigation strategies for UX, through learning from past experiences and developments in the area of software quality.

How to reduce the UX bottleneck – train your software developers

ABSTRACTUsability 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.

Whose Experience Do We Care About? Analysis of the Fitness of Scrum and Kanban to User Experience

Two project management approaches, Agile and Lean, have increasingly been adopted in recent years for software development. Meanwhile, in the field of human–computer interaction (HCI), user experience (UX) has become central in research and practice. The new hybrids between the two fields—Agile UX and Lean UX—were born a few years ago. As Agile, Lean, and UX have different principles and practices, one can query whether the couplings are well justified and whether Agile or Lean is more compatible with UX work. We have conducted a conceptual analysis and tended to conclude that Lean instantiated as Kanban fits UX work better than Agile instantiated as Scrum. To explore further our claim, we performed a secondary data analysis of 10 semistructured interviews with practitioners working with Scrum and Kanban in different sectors (Study 1). This study enabled us to gain insights into the applications of the two processes in real-life cases, their strengths and weaknesses, and factors influencing the practicality of implementing them. Both processes seem not favorable for UX work in practice. Among others, one intriguing observation is loose adherence to the related guidelines and principles. A query derived from the analyses of the interviews is that “customer,” as compared with “user,” has more frequently been referred to by our interviewees, irrespective of the process they adopted. We have then been motivated to investigate this issue, using a web-based survey with another batch of practitioners (N = 73) in the software industry (Study 2). Results of the survey indicate that the practitioners in general had a reasonable understanding of the concepts “user” and “customer,” although a minority tended to treat them as synonyms. Limitations of the current studies and implications for future work are discussed.

Leah Buley: Toward Collaborative, Pragmatic User-Experience Work

In an interview, Leah Buley of Adaptive Path discusses using design principles and black-hat sessions to foster responsible, collaborative user-experience work.