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.
In the past years, people have started to use social media to interact actively about TV content. However, despite of over a decade of active research and product development, Social TV has not been adopted by large populations. This paper aims to support designing interaction for Social TV services and, more specifically, designing for the presence and togetherness between viewers. Our constructive research consisted of a series of user studies and iterative prototyping. We conducted user studies with altogether 51 participants both in laboratory and in real-life contexts. To support the presence, the final prototype includes three different modalities of communication -voice and text-based chat, and animated gestures with avatars. The qualitative findings imply that gestures with avatars in virtual space support Social TV and the experience of presence. Finally, we present an analysis of Social TV heuristics and their validity in the context of our designs.
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