Are Software Companies Aware of UX

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2014

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.

2009

The importance of adopting usability engineering methods in software development is eventually recognized by an increasing number of companies. However, several studies show that, in spite of the declared awareness of usability as an important software quality and the benefits reported in the literature, many companies still neglect in their development practices those activities that are essential to ensure that their products are usable and capable of generating a satisfying user experience. This paper describes the case of the project K-People, funded by “Regione Puglia”, in which usability engineering methods were employed in the development of a company web portal. It can be seen that the designers’ attitude completely changes once they directly experience how effective such methods really are in the design and development of quality software.

2020

Usability is now a well-established concept in software engineering resulting in a major shift in the design, development, and deployment of software applications. Moreover, the appreciation of usability, as an important aspect in managing the potentials risks caused by inappropriate outcomes of the interaction between systems and their users, is rapidly increasing. It is, nevertheless, critical for the developed software to be able to assist users in carrying out their intended tasks without unnecessary effort or frustration on the part of users. This is what usability evaluation strives to achieve. Better decisions relating to usability at any stage of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) can be captured by taking user experience into consideration. Many methods have been developed for capturing the user perspective of software, such as questionnaires, checklists, and laboratory tests. However, due to the different, rapid and competitive development of systems, the huge vari...

2011

Abstract―The importance of usability engineering in software development is acknowledged by an increasing number of software organizations. This paper reports from a survey of the practical impact of usability engineering in software development organizations. The survey was conducted in Southern Italy, replicating one conducted in Northern Denmark three years earlier.

Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering, 2008

In some software development contexts, understanding 'who else' to report usability results to and how this must be done has a larger impact on the usability of products, in the long run, than reporting results to designers and developers in planned and ongoing software development projects. This situation is true in some parts of the telecommunication area. This is an area that constantly presents new usage possibilities arising from new 'hot' technology and competitive situations, i.e. not primarily from internally identified user needs. Understanding how use-oriented knowledge can have the greatest impact in this context is a challenge. As engineers we must be prepared to adjust our work to varied actors and environments under specific conditions to optimize our influence. In this case, how do the 'new hot technology and competitive situation focus' affect our possibilities to introduce use-oriented knowledge? Our desire to achieve highest leverage from performed usability work made us realize that we need to take advantage of existing usability test reporting as a first step in introducing more of user experience in the user-orientation.

A vast majority of the people in the western world use software systems on daily basis for achieving their goals. To be able to do that each person needs to communicate what he or she wants to do to the system and receive a response. This communication needs to be easy for the user, especially when the system is new to him or her. Otherwise, the user either quits using the system; it takes a very long time or gets very irritated. A software team that is making new software needs to evaluate the usability of the system and various methods have been introduced in the literature to do that.

Software Process: Improvement and Practice, 2003

A number of efforts are being undertaken to integrate usability engineering and software engineering in the software-development process. The majority of these integration efforts focus on software developers, usability engineers, or defining new processes. In this article, we report on an effort to involve the consumer of software by providing a mechanism, namely the common industry format (CIF), to formally request usability information on the software to be purchased. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

2007

ABSTRACT A key challenge when producing useful and usable software is lack of impact from usability work on software development–and maybe also deficiencies of typical usability work. This paper present a forthcoming CHI 2007 workshop activity where we aim at develop a more coherent and realistic understanding of this challenge, and the possibilities of how to increase the impact from usability work when developing high quality software products.

In spite of the importante of software usability, in Guatemala there has been traditionally little awareness of the fundamental concepts of this discipline.