How to reduce the UX bottleneck – train your software developers

ABSTRACT

Usability 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Training
• UX design
• usability
• agile software development

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all participating staff at TC Electronic, SenDx Medical and Radiometer Medical for participating in this work. We thank Søren Vinter Færch at Bankdata and Nis Bornø at Aalborg University for their involvement in the training.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

We thank Aalborg University, Radiometer Medical and the Danish Ministry for Science and Education for funding the research presented here.