Stakeholder Involvement: A Success Factor for Achieving Better UX Integration
This work addresses a practical problem for software developers and UX practitioners in agile settings, but it is incremental as it builds on existing literature without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the lack of clear guidelines for involving stakeholders in integrating user experience (UX) practices into agile software development, presenting two guidelines that address the dynamic, subjective, holistic, and context-dependent characteristics of UX.
Stakeholder involvement is one of the major success factors in integrating user experience (UX) practices into software development processes and organizations. It is also a necessity for agile software development. However, practitioners still have limited access to guidelines on successful involvement of UX stakeholders in agile settings. Moreover, agile UX literature does not well address the specific characteristics of UX and it does not clearly differentiate between UX and usability work. This paper presents two guidelines for supporting stakeholder involvement in both UX integration and the daily UX work. In particular, we focus on the special characteristics of UX: being dynamic, subjective, holistic, and context-dependent. The guidelines clarify practical implications of these characteristics for practitioners. In addition, they can help researchers in addressing these characteristics better in agile UX research.