Title
Investigating and promoting UX practice in industry: An experimental study.
Abstract
The efforts of addressing user experience (UX) in product development keep 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. This special issue focuses on “Interplay between User Experience Evaluation and Software Development”, stating that the gap between human-computer interaction and software engineering with regard to usability has somewhat been narrowed. Unfortunately, our experience shows that software development organizations perform few usability engineering activities or none at all. Several authors acknowledge that, in order to understand the reasons of the limited impact of usability engineering and UX methods, and to try to modify this situation, it is fundamental to thoroughly analyze current software development practices, involving practitioners and possibly working from inside the companies. This article contributes to this research line by reporting an experimental study conducted with software companies. The study has confirmed that still too many companies either neglect usability and UX, or do not properly consider them. Interesting problems emerged. This article gives suggestions on how they may be properly addressed, since their solution is the starting point for reducing the gap between research and practice of usability and UX. It also provides further evidence on the value of the research method, called Cooperative Method Development, based on the collaboration of researchers and practitioners in carrying out empirical research; it has been used in a step of the performed study and has revealed to be instrumental for showing practitioners why to improve their development processes and how to do so.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1016/j.ijhcs.2013.10.004
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Keywords
Field
DocType
Software life cycle,Human-centered design,Survey,Interview,Focus group,Cooperative Method Development
User experience design,Usability engineering,Computer science,Usability,Knowledge management,Usability goals,Human–computer interaction,Software development process,Software development,User-centered design,User experience evaluation
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
72
6
1071-5819
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
39
1.65
29
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Carmelo Ardito142546.26
Paolo Buono234625.68
Danilo Caivano340741.00
Maria Francesca Costabile4959114.09
Rosa Lanzilotti532634.41