The efforts of addressing user experience (UX) in product development keeps growing, as demonstrated by the proliferation of workshops and conferences bringing together academics and practitioners, who aim at creating interactive software able to satisfy their users. Unfortunately, human-centred design and methods addressing usability and UX are always mentioned in research papers but yet very seldom applied in the current practice of software development in industry. In this paper, some findings of studies we have recently performed with software companies are reported. They show that either companies still neglect usability and UX, or they do not properly address them. Thus, in this workshop that seems to consider UX evaluation as a usual practice and aims to optimize the impact of UX evaluation feedback on software development, our provocative statement is: Are software companies (at least) aware of UX? The studies summarized in this paper show that, in many cases, the answer is NO. We are working to overcome the current situation and the paper concludes by providing some suggestions to fill the gap between research and practice of UX.
Categories and Subject Descriptors H5.m. [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Miscellaneous; D2.10 [Software]: Methodology.
INTRODUCTION
Designing for UX requires understanding user
requirements from both a pragmatic (system functionalities
and interaction) and a hedonic point view [
In this paper, we briefly report some findings of recent
studies involving software companies. On the basis of such
studies, we provide some indications for making UX an
explicit goal of software developers, as well as suggestions
on how to fill the gap between what Human-Computer
Interaction (HCI) researchers propose about design and
evaluation of UX and the activities performed by software
engineers in their daily practices of software development.
ABOUT USABILITY ENGINEERING IN SOFTWARE
COMPANIES
Our research group has been working for defining HCD
techniques and methodologies that could be pragmatically
integrated in the work activities of software developers. For
example, in [
Despite the efforts of HCI researchers, HCD approaches
are applied only to a limited extent by practitioners, as
shown in [
The above results have been confirmed in our recent survey
reported in [
HOW ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES MIGHT HELP?
As follow-up of the study in [
In this paper, we briefly report on a study we have performed in order to know more about the software development life cycle of a company of medium-high size. The study had two main objectives: 1) to view, capture and understand the work practice by employing observational methods and in-situ interviews; 2) to integrate HCD activities in key points of the software development life cycle, such as interviews and usage scenarios during the requirement analysis, as well as prototyping and evaluation during system design.
The study was conducted at a medium software company located in Southern Italy, which develops products in different domains, primarily public administration and bank. The company accounts three different Business Units (BUs): Public Administration, Finance, and Research. The latter is mainly involved in research projects. Each BU could be considered as a separate small company, with its own personnel for carrying out all the activities in the software life cycle: project leaders, analysts, designers, developers, BU managers, etc. All BUs adopt a traditional waterfall life-cycle model for several reasons, primarily management background and project constraints, which completely neglect usability and UX issues. The study has been carried out in the Public Administration and Research BUs. Two master students participated in the study, each one involved in the activities of a BU. Their work was part of their master thesis in HCI. They were in the company for a total of 120 working days. Specifically, Rossana, the student in the Public Administration BU, was assigned to a project for creating an application for tourists visiting a certain town, running on a mobile device; it was committed by the town municipality. Diego, the student in the Research BU, was assigned to a research project on “Technologies for Situational Sea Awereness”, whose aim is to develop hardware and software to provide services to various people, from oceanography researchers to skippers, and others.
The details of the study and the analysis of the collected data will be described in another paper we are currently writing, and can be discussed at the workshop. We summarize here some findings, which were confirmed by the interviews to the BU managers, performed about a month after the end of Rossana’s and Diego’s work. As most important effect, they were surprised to see how effective and efficient the HCD methods that Rossana and Diego used were. Thanks to this experience, they finally understood that the minimal resources spent in the iterative prototyping were widely fulfilled by the obtained benefits. The Research BU manager appreciated a lot the fact that Diego, in the requirement analysis, insisted a lot for including a detailed specification of user requirements. He did it and also performed semi-structured interviews to validate such requirements with other stakeholders. The manager actually understood how fruitful these activities were and how meeting other stakeholders helped resolving several concerns. Diego insisted for involving more real users, pointing out that how different final users are from other stakeholders in terms of needs and expectations, but this was not possible.
Both Rossana and Diego used paper prototypes a lot, discussing them in participatory meetings with other stakeholders, i.e. the other project partners in the case of Diego research project, while Rossana organized short meetings with all designers. Because she was involved in the design of an application devoted to people visiting a certain town, she was able to involve a few other persons in the company (secretaries and staff members), who acted like tourists interacting with the prototypes. Even if the approach might appear a bit naïf, HCI researchers know how useful these “quick and dirty” methods might be. To test a running prototype with real users, Diego contacted two friend of him, who are professional skippers, and performed a thinking aloud test. They pointed out a feature that was not as useful as designers considered, and indicated some other problems.
After an analysis of various tools for rapid prototyping, Diego selected Justinmind Prototyper (http://www.justinmind.com/) and used it for creating several successive prototypes. The BU managers are now enthusiastic of this tool and are getting it to use in the early design phase. Rossana and Diego also performed several heuristic evaluations of the prototypes. Thus, they used methods that are very cost effective in order to demonstrate that methods that require limited resources and little training of company employees, who could perform them, actually exist.
What performed in the above study is in line with other
works. For example, Jim Hudson states that a variety of
methods have to be used at all phases of the product life
cycle [
SUGGESTIONS
The ethnographic study confirmed how it is important to
develop paper prototypes and to discuss them with other
stakeholders, including end users. This is a first important
suggestion for companies. It might appear that it is not a
novel finding, but it is worth emphasizing that it is obvious
within the research community, whereas the actual problem
is to transfer the use of iterative prototyping in the practice
of companies. With our ethnographic study, we provided
evidence for the company of the advantages of informal
meetings in which several stakeholders, including end
users, analyse prototypes, starting from those on papers.
This study and other previous experiences of ours on HCD
in practice (e.g., see [
Our last suggestion is that, once we succeed in getting
companies aware of usability and UX, we try to satisfy
their request of suitable methods requiring limited
resources and help integrating them in their work practices.
Current situation shows that this is still very challenging.
Only a few scattered experiences of designing and
evaluating UX in practice are reported in literature. For
example, at Nokia, which has a long history in designing
for experience, the product development process includes
continuous evaluation of usability and UX in different
phases of the life cycle. After the release on the market of
the product, feedback is gathered from the field through
controlled and uncontrolled studies in order to collect
information for improving successive products [