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

Abstract

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.

Notes

¹ In ISO 9241-210:2010, the term “human-centered design” is used instead of “user-centered design” with the underlying rationale of emphasizing that this part of ISO 9241 addresses impacts on stakeholders other than users. Nonetheless, in practice, the two terms are used interchangeably.

² In exploring the experiential component of Customer Experience, Gentile, Spiller and Noci (2007) derived the definition from the three resources cited: “The Customer Experience originates from a set of interactions between a customer and a product, a company, or part of its organization, which provoke a reaction. This experience is strictly personal and implies the customer’s involvement at different levels (rational, emotional, sensorial physical and spiritual). Its evaluation depends on the comparison between a customer’s expectations and the stimuli coming from the interaction with the company and its offering in correspondence of the different moments of contact or touch-points (LaSalle & Britton, 2003; Shaw & Ivens, 2005; Smith, 1999)” (p. 397).

³ http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/High-tech_statistics

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Effie Lai-Chong Law

Effie Lai-Chong Law is Reader at University of Leicester, UK. Her research focuses are usability and User Experience (UX) methodologies and their applications in various domains, including technology-enhanced learning, serious games in the context of law and cultural heritage, and cross-cultural User-Centred Design (UCD) research. She has been involved in a number of EU- and UK-funded projects, leading the UCD work in them.

Marta Kristín Lárusdóttir

Marta Kristín Lárusdóttir is an assistant professor at Reykjavik University, Iceland. Her main research area is the interplay between usability and UX activities and software development processes, especially in Agile development processes such as Scrum and Lean software development. She has been collaborating with various software companies in industry, and also an active member in IFIP TC13.