Agile User Experience Development in a Large Software Organization: Good Expertise but Limited Impact

While Agile methods were originally introduced for small, tightly coupled teams, leaner ways of working are becoming a practical method to run entire enterprises. As the emphasis of user experience work has inherently been on the early phases before starting the development, it also needs to be adapted to the Agile way of working. To improve the current practices in Agile user experience work, we determined the present state of a multi-continental software development organization that already had a functioning user experience team. In this paper, we describe the most prevalent issues regarding the interaction of user experience design and software development activities, and suggest improvements to fix those. Most of the observed problems were related to communication issues and to the service mode of the user experience team. The user experience team was operating between management and development organizations trying to adapt to the dissimilar practices of both the disciplines.

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