Artifact-Facilitated Communication in Agile User-Centered Design

Abstract

One of the main challenges faced while establishing the integration of Agile and User-Centered Design is how to facilitate communication among the invariably distinct involved practitioners. Advocating the use of artifacts as enablers in this scenario, this paper aims to explore and understand the artifacts which can facilitate the communication between developers and designers in an Agile User-Centered Design approach. Drawing upon a netnography of a globally-distributed online community, we carried out community observation, data collection, and data analysis. The data analysis and interpretation pointed out two major themes: artifacts facilitate communication and artifacts support collaboration. Our paper provides an overview of the artifacts used for communication in Agile User-Centered Design and highlights how artifact-facilitated communication ensues in the industry through a perspective from practitioners.

Repensando Papeis em Equipes Ágeis: Um Estudo de Caso no Uso de uma Abordagem Combinada de Desenvolvimento Ágil, User-Centered Design e Lean Startup

“…Outra mudança significativa está relacionada a inserção do papel do Product Designer que impactou diretamente nas responsabilidade de todos os papéis, pois agora todos passam a desenvolver o produto centrado no usuário. Garcia, da Silva e Silveira [Garcia et al 2019] falam sobre a importância em ter uma pessoa que foca no usuário durante todo o processo de desenvolvimento do produto.…”

“…Como uma forma de promover melhorias nessa relação, estudos (e.g., [Dobrigkeit and de Paula 2017] ) têm relatado a necessidade de equipes adotarem uma abordagem combinada que utiliza User-Centered Design, Lean Startup eÁgil [Dobrigkeit and de Paula 2017]. A integração dessas três abordagens tem sido apontada como promissora uma vez que o User-Centered Design [Garcia et al 2019] fornece ao desenvolvimentoágil um roteiro para soluções criativas e centradas no usuário, enquanto o Lean Startup [Ries 2011] mantém os stakeholders envolvidos desde a concepção do produto, buscando rapidamente identificar as necessidades reais do usuário final e pivotando propostas de solução antes mesmo de iniciar o desenvolvimento de uma solução que possa vir a não ser a ideal ou necessária, focando no valor agregado ao negócio, fornece uma estrutura para validar e medir o ciclo de vida do produto.…”

UX information in the daily work of an agile team: A distributed cognition analysis

“…According to these authors, artefacts support the introduction of a common language to avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Garcia et al (2019) investigated an online agile community to understand how artefacts are used to mediate communication between UX and agile professionals. The results revealed that mock-ups, sketches of user interfaces and personas are the most used UX artefacts that support conversation in agile teams.…”

“…For example, several studies report that mockups are the artefact most often adopted by software professionals to represent UX work (Gray, 2016;Kashfi et al, 2017;Ardito et. al, 2014) and that mock-ups are used in combination with technical documents and user stories (Bordin and Angeli, 2016;Garcia et al, 2019). Others have also found that most UX information is discussed in agile ceremonies rather than captured in artefacts (Cajander et al, 2013;Garcia et al, 2019).…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, little is known about the characteristics of UX information that agile teams process, and how this information is used. Many of the studies on agile and UX focus on the integration of methods and processes from agile and UX (Wale-Kolade et al, 2013;Jurca et al, 2014;Brown et al, 2011), and on communication challenges (Ferreira et al, 2012;Bordin and Angeli, 2016;Garcia et al, 2019). Others present results based on data collected with developers through interviews, questionnaires and focus groups about agile and UX (Larusdottir et al, 2017;Ardito et al, 2014;Kashfi et al, 2017;Gray, 2016), but do not examine how agile teams process UX information in their daily work.…”