Today the challenge in the mobile industry is User experience (UX), which is starting to affect software engineering processes. A common use or definition of the term UX is still not de facto defined. Industry and academy are both in agreement that UX definitely includes more than the previous usability definition. Our concern in this paper is how industry and manufacturers can manage to successfully get a UX idea into and through the software development cycle? Our discussion includes obvious components from usability and new UX components that are not taken into account by prevailing HCI approaches. We will discuss branding, trends and timing as vital components in that puzzle.
Mobile phones have reached a point beyond the level where technical hot news are not enough to satisfy buyers, because today mobile devices also have to include the aspect of user experience. Apple’s iPhone is one indication of this change. In recent years the mobile industry has put in a lot of efforts to grasp and develop products that can be claimed to be User Experience (UX) products. A mental shift from a usability focus toward a more UX driven requirement gathering focus and handling has occurred. One reason is that UX discourses has been ongoing for a long period, even though mostly connected to new services like web, multimedia and other media centric services. Interestingly, these are products that acquire a different experience than the mobile applications and services. Another related factor is today’s improved hardware possibilities including their infrastructural developed support on the market.
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First, usability as a “hygiene” factor needs to be in place if we
want to hit in a mass-market launch for a new type of device.
Meaning that the functionality and performance of a device are
things a user doesn’t notice until they create annoyance. In this
view, in a well worked up market, usability has become a
dissatisfier [
Third, the brand is an important part of the total product design, just as vital and important for success as is the design itself. We argue that this is one of the reasons explaining why Apple made a direct success with their iPhone and Neonode did not. New kids on the block always have a hard time, and have to make up an own role an identity to be both understood and accepted. Fourth, trends need to be monitored and understood. How can you predict and take into account that a “fuzz” or “buzz” in a small group of people will turn into a mass market trend? How do you foresee and market that e.g. a mobile touch screen device will become a device in “every man’s” hand instead of its initial status as status device in the pockets of the businessman tribe? Trend awareness and understanding about marketing, brands and target groups have always been important, but will in the mobile UX era be vital for success.
Fifth, timing is a vital component in a successful launch of a product? There is more than one understanding of timing. If you talk to product owners etc they will argue that if a specific device misses its target release window that device could and maybe should be cancelled. This is obvious and understandable, here we talk about a specific type of timing; the maturity of the market for a device with a specific functionality. When is a specific functionality or technology mature enough to be embraced and used without any hurdles or suspicion by the market and end users? Take the e-commerce adaptation as an example from the PC world. It took some years before users found e-commerce applications comfortable and secure enough to be used for paying stuff from the internet. This even though the technology, security solutions and infrastructure had been in place and worked a long time. Could this type of user phenomena be foreseen and taken to account when to launch a product at the optimal time? Total design, brand, trends and adequate timing are subjects in need of further understanding within today’s mobile industry; both concerning how to predict coming trends and brands, when to launch products, as well as how to secure and control the resulting UX designs throughout the software development process. Regarding the former challenge we lend at taking inspiration and borrow insights from the area of innovation. Knowledge about innovation processes and framework could be used to understand and prioritize actions to create and launch products in a successful manner. When it comes to the latter challenge, we present one solution in this paper. Our solution fits the established engineering idea of splitting product complexity into smaller manageable sub-functions, and working in multidisciplinary teams. In large software development projects this splitting approach has proven successful to cut time costs. Below is provided a hierarchic map where we place the aspects discussed in this paper in relation to the following categories: User Experience, Market, Technology, and Software Development. Here it is possible to visualize relationships such as: brands and trends exist on a market with potential consumers; brand and trend is part of the user experience that companies tries to design to pleasure users; successful match between these is highly dependent on adequate judgments of maturity and timing for a product. We can also see where the border of traditional usability efforts is today. We do not emphasize new or existing technology in this papers discussion, even though, we indicate the importance of timing and maturity also here. Our contribution called “Policing” can be found under the category Software Development under Methodology and Requirements Engineering fulfilling the role of monitoring and securing a holistic product view. The Software development methodology is in this paper refers to the engineering idea of splitting the product complexity into smaller more manageable sub-functions (and teams), i.e. a traditional software engineering development approach.
The HCI community is nowadays agreeing that UX include more factors than defined in usability. Usability is an established part of software development even though maybe not as formalized as needed. UX on the other hand is not established throughout the development process and our belief is that when it is formalized and established it will change the way we understand and talk about requirement handling as well as product development processes and methods.
Usability as such in today’s mobile business and product development is a thermometer that sets the “hygiene” level of a product. Users today take the “ease of use” part of product concepts for granted and will not praise the fact that a product or service has good usability. On the other hand users will complain loudly if the product doesn’t live up to the expected level of hygiene. Usability has become a dissatisfier. Hence, the challenge for usability engineers is to collect dissatisfiers and feed them back as prioritized requirements. These will affect the product negatively if not treated as an important part of UX. In a sense dissatifiers can be perceived as the base of UX. These are aspects of a product or service that just have to work and when they do they will not be noticed by the users. Examples of the areas we talking about here are responsiveness, snappiness, learnability and visibility, effectiveness, efficiency etc. Keep in mind that handling dissatisfiers is not enough to reach a decent UX level. To do that we need to understand what pleasures a user during both use and owning a product. When we understand above it will be possible to launch products with satisfying level of UX.
Today we see trends in society that emerge from and support environmental concerns. We can also see an increase in tribing activities that in one level has to do with big movements of refugees moving to other part of the world, to find “shelter from the storm” in new countries. This has created a possible growth for national groups that use violence as a toll for securing their tribal belonging. The other level of tribal behavior has more to do with groups that have found new ways to indulge themselves in their hobbies/interests. Examples of this is the late middle-aged bikers living their teenage dream as they drive down the roads as aged “hell-riders” on their Harley Davidson’s.
Leading trend institutes has identified trends that need to be
understood and taken into account as important aspects to succeed
when developing a product with high level of UX. Below you
find some trends that one well known trend institute; Faith
Popcorn’s BrainReserve describe on their website [
Pleasure revenge: Consumers are having a secret bacchanal. They’re mad as hell and want to cut loose again.
Small indulgences: Stressed-out consumers want to indulge in affordable luxuries and seek ways to reward themselves. Cashing out: Working women and men, questioning personal/career satisfaction and goals, opt for simpler living. Clanning: Belonging to a group that represents common feelings, causes or ideals; validating one’s own belief system.
Cocooning: The need to protect oneself from the harsh, unpredictable realities of the outside world.
Fantasy adventures: Modern age whets our desire for roads untaken.
In the mobile business obvious trends are staying connected and sharing content, this simultaneously with being an assessor expressing belonging and social status. To capture these types of requirements and to be able to support these kinds of trends we need to involve more than traditional usability evaluation can offer; a new UX and innovation related perspective of capturing user requirements is needed. These factors also need to be translated and incorporated in new formalized methods in the process of product and software development.
Neonode relied on the existing touch screen market as entry for
their products. To their disadvantage they did not have large
enough credibility among users in the market of touch phones to
become a truly market success from start. Apple’s iPhone had
both credibility and a successful touch screen product. A product
that provided the user with intuitive and responsive use, a
pleasurable experience concerning the overall design, together
with the pleasure of owning and showing of it as an assessor.
Besides this iPhone also supported the “Mac, Apple” tribe. This
new product called iPhone could actually be claimed to help these
users secure their status and existing as members of precisely this
tribe. This is a group of users that committed themselves to
Apple’s specific brand and design, a consumer group that buys for
reasons of precisely experience and design (that Apple products
helps them to communicate) rather than for a specific set of
functionality. The fact that Apple has a very strong brand could
be the difference when it comes to success or not. User have
expectations and/or and experiences of Apple as “the” design
company whereby the company gets a competitive advantage
over other on-a-technical-level-equal-companies. Apple has the
knowledge and the company culture needed in order to “live the
brand”. Other less brand known companies has to rely on the
product without any help from a brand expectation or experience.
One reason to this could be as Richard Mulholland states in his
article; Fuck. Love. Brand: [
Good UX understanding an input is one side of the coin, how to
organize with respect this understanding and input is the other
side. As previous argumentation revealed it has become more and
more important to deliver UX products. This is not enough, these
products has to be developed faster and faster, whereby it also
becomes vital for an organization to continue to keep the
development time short.
"Everything about mobile phone design and production has to be
quick, so it's months from when there is an idea for a phone to the
roll out on the market," said James Marshall, Sony Ericsson's
head of product marketing, who is in Las Vegas this week for the
trade fair. "The market moves very quickly, so you have to
minimize development times."[
Engineers often approach complexity through splitting the
product complexity into smaller more manageable sub-functions.
In the end all the sub-functions are put together and a product
appears, hopefully as the designer or the idea maker intended.
Deviations from the intended product idea are handled through
iterated defect reporting and defect handling until the product is
judged to have sufficient product quality. Hence, monitoring
product quality is conducted by processes in which milestone
criteria are measured mainly by different ways of controlling
defect levels and defect status. So far this approach has been
sufficient enough when striving to secure a product’s quality from
a task and goal perspective (classic usability view from HCI), but
still no guarantee for enhancing the user experience (that
increases the chances of product success on the market). In the
goal and task view three canonical usability metrics have
dominated, i.e. effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Where
the latter, satisfaction, has been a term capturing the felt
experience on a very high level, i.e. without further dividing it
into its diverse constituent elements. Today the UX level of
quality needs to be handled. Handling this quality forces us to
divide satisfaction into other soft values such as exemplified by
fun, pleasure, pride, intimacy, joy, etc. [
A risk with dividing is that the product owners (often Product Managers whining the company) will have an even harder time knowing that the intended product is the one that will turn up when all “bits and pieces” are assembled again to constitute the product.
Figure 2 visualizes above described work in multidisciplinary
teams. Here the separateness of a product vision into many
divided requirements means risks of not monitoring UX in a
holistic way; it also represent today’s goal and task oriented
development models. The outcome/product includes the risk of
becoming something that was not intended.
One problem that follows when splitting the product into smaller
manageable sub-functions in the production process is the risk of
losing a holistic product view. In the quality of user experience
apparently small changes made in different subparts can actually
constitute a huge user experience change when put together in the
final product. It is also difficult to predict the effects of such
separately handled changes. Applications in mobile products have
in the past been more or less separate entities or islands in a
product. And opportunities have existed for application designers
and engineers to apply their own solutions and create their own
application specific components with “isolated” specific behavior
to support a use case (see [
In order to secure the vision of product intent, in complex and multi requirement projects, the organization needs to acknowledge the need for what we call policing (actually having real cups in mind doing police(ing) work in the positive sense appreciated by citizens). Not just defect levels, but also and maybe even more important, the holistic product intent throughout the development cycle and in all different teams participating in the development process. This is needed to secure an efficient and effective way of working towards a successful product.
There is a risk of losing the UX intent of a product if no support
structure is in place. In order to keep the organization “mean and
lean” and at the same time deliver UX focused products we need
to secure the vision of a product throughout the development
process. Today many companies have developed methods to
validate concepts of the final product with end users. UIQ
technology AB uses for instance their UTUM method. [
Even though most companies have both verbal and written UX statements and visions on their walls as lead goals for their business, an overall UX strategy are often missed out. A products quality definition is still related to different sub-levels, measurements and predictions of defects as criteria, and seldom includes usability and/or UX quality criteria. This means there is no connection or possible way of measuring the “temperature” of UX in the product during the development between vision and final product. There is also a embarrassing divergence between UX quality and existing product quality, meaning that we have processes and means from traditional software engineering to monitor product quality by defects, which do not constitute the wished for guarantee to achieving an envisioned high level of UX in the final product.
Therefore a complementary way to also inject UX quality
assurance into the development process would be by:
1. Gaining acceptance of a vision through user research with end
users by means of methods like early prototype testing.
2. Policing the vision throughout the development process by
internal review methods to secure UX product quality. UX quality
criteria and milestones should be included in an overall design
process influencing the development process. A new quality
assurance role needs to be created for UX experts to act as
guardians for the UX quality.
3. Validating the product and evaluating the result against the
vision, again by formalizing existing methods like UTUM [
It is identified that the academic fields of Software Engineering (SE), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and Participatory Design (PD) to a large extent developed divided from each other [Juristo et al. 2001, Kensing 3003]. Each area is highly challenging and has today decades of important documented knowledge; SE has significant successes in requirements gathering related to software development organization, HCI in usability evaluation and PD in techniques and methodologies for user participation. Industry has picked and applied parts from the different fields despite the academic separation. Five years ago a mix of the knowledge inherent in these fields was considered to provide a good enough foundation for building successful development process. In recent years the mobile industry has started to compete with what can be claimed to be User Experience (UX) products. Hence a fourth aspect called UX appears that also needs to be integrated on the top of these aspects.
When will the above mentioned areas develop to support also the
understanding of UX, so that we can find better ways to capture
and monitor when a market is mature enough for appreciating a
product or service? We need to widen our understanding of users
also in the UX aspect. Find ways to monitor UX requirements
throughout the process. UX should be the backbone of product
development today and not as in many cases something that is
added as a final finishing procedure of a product. Such approach
is just a “lipstick on a chicken” approach and will not lead to a
successful launch of a product. We need to change existing
development processes to be built around UX definitions, and not
just incorporate UX as add on to already existing processes. UX is
a new perspective we have to apply in order to successfully
launch products at the right point of time within an “open” market
window; in which it supports new and existing trends, and of
course deliver satisfactory levels of hygiene. Hence, UX will
change how we perceive and perform product development.
As future work we will continue to look for inspiration and
knowledge within the area of innovation. Denning and Dunham
[
Today we monitor and define product quality by measuring defects levels in different ways. This will still be needed but must be complemented by UX quality measurements. The product quality definition needs to be increased and widened to include measurements from the UX area and new quality criteria need to be accounted for with actually higher priority than previous subquality criteria. More organizational effort should be spent on developing Metrics and KPI’s for monitoring and securing UX product quality.
When we decide to prioritize UX in products a new development approach is needed as well, this to ensure that the intended UX appears in products at the market. On a high level there needs to be a cultural shift into a more UX oriented and UX driven mentality within the whole product development organization. On an organizational level UX quality assurance needs to be established by recognizing and given authority to UX expertise that can secure the total UX product quality in all levels of development. In this paper we suggest UX “guardians”, see figure 4 below, for policing the UX throughout the product development. In order to introduce this approach a cultural widening or increased knowledge among existing SWD roles of e.g. Project managers and Product Managers is needed in order to break the traditional cultural views of monitoring and planning project deliveries. We think it is possible and the suggested approach can be well integrated in traditional SWD processes, but emphasis the need for other competences and milestones than present today e.g. project Managers, UX experts, market experts & Product Managers and technical expertise have to cooperate to a much larger extent than in most large companies in mobile industry today.
We wish to thank Gary Denman from UIQ Technology AB for providing valuable support and insights. This work was partly funded by Vinnova (a Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems) under a research grant for the project WeBIS [5].
WeBiS, http://www.webis.se