Software start-ups develop innovative software products working with disruptive technologies in time pressure and market-driven environment. Recently, User eXperience (UX) has become a hot topic that interests software teams of start-ups. However, software and UX professionals have struggled to match UX practices into the development activities, partially because of the lack of resources in the start-ups. This paper investigates how software start-ups handle UX activities during software development and how relevant UX is to these companies’ professionals. To achieve our aim, we surveyed 88 professionals who take part in software teams in star-ups, analyzing the responses using descriptive and statistical methods. Our results reveal that regardless of having or not a UX position in the start-up, UX practices are spread in different software development phases and not fitting into them. Results also show although professionals consider UX relevant and recognize important skills to perform UX activities, some obstacles hinder the effective use of UX in software start-ups. From the survey results, we identified a set of challenges to be overcome in consolidating the UX work in software start-ups. By diagnosing the UX state-of-practice in start-up scenarios and identifying such challenges, our work contributes to provides relevant insights to further academic and practical studies in this field.
Abstract. Although both agile developers and UX designers have a common concern regarding to build software with quality, they usually have different viewpoint of the user experience and usability. We have proposed a protocol in which personas and Nielsen's heuristics were used as a common vocabulary between designers and developers (SCRUM team) for the communication of recommendations and/or design solutions. We have adopted action research to conduct our research, performing a workshop and interviews to study the feasibility of the proposal; and later two case studies to compare and evaluate the use and non-use the protocol. In the final, adding to the case study comparison, we interviewed the SCRUM team who revealed that the protocol improved the understanding of recommendations and the Nielsen's heuristics contributed to objectively communicate the main problems of interaction.
Empirical research on software development practices in startups is growing. However, little has been investigated about how User eXperience (UX) work has been carried out in software startups. The primary objective of this paper is to investigate what software startups need from UX work. To achieve this goal, we conducted open-ended interviews and retrospective meetings with 16 software professionals from two software startups in Brazil. We analysed the data qualitatively using different coding approaches: initial coding, focused coding, and theoretical coding. We found 14 UX work-related needs which emerged from the daily practices used for software development in the two startups studied. Based on our findings, we propose an initial theoretical framework that highlights two theoretical themes and four groups underlying the needs identified. Our study reveals several relationships between UX work-related needs which are helpful to understand in order to identify what startups need from UX work in practice and to focus startup teams' efforts on the most urgent needs. As future work, we plan to explore ways in which these needs may be addressed so that UX work may be put into practice in software startups.
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