Agile-User Experience Design: Does the Involvement of Usability Experts Improve the Software Quality?

In the past decade, numerous experiments and research proposed to take the advantages of Agile and User Centred Design methods in a mixed method called Agile-User Experience Design or Agile-UX. This combination raises a number of questions. Notably, it remains unclear who should be responsible of the usability in an Agile-UX project development. After a review of the literature on Agile, User Centred Design and Agile-UX, this paper focuses on the involvement of usability experts in Agile-UX. The literature discusses the involvement of usability experts in terms of processes and work methods, but never in terms of the necessity to involve usability experts to improve the software quality. To start answering this question, an experiment was conducted to explore the necessity to involve usability experts in the team. The results are that the involvement of a User Centred Design expert improves the quality of the developed product and the users' satisfaction in Agile-UX. Keywords-Agile; Agile-UX; User-Centred Design; Team composition; Involvement.

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