User Experience / Agile User Experience

Usability and user-centered design have found their way into many organizations and development processes. There is a solid body of usability knowledge available all around the world and maybe in your company as well.

However, new areas of user-centered design become more and more popular and usability experts should catch up with them. At the latest since Microsoft uncovered Surface and started sending an army of “evangelists” around the world, the term “user experience” raised a lot more attention compared to the recent talking about usability in the media.

User experience adds a new dimension of design to the supply chain of software development. For many products, it is no longer about how you “use” a piece of software, but how you “experience” it. From computer games we know, that a high user experience even outweighs an imperfect usability quality.

Usability experts should participate in designing processes for developing great user experiences and we should investigate in which areas of expertise we have to extend our current method- and tool-sets. Usability experts should also be able to provide methods to develop for a high “user experience” if a customer decides that this is a primary goal in a project.

In addition, the combination of agile processes and user experience as well is a very interesting field. Especially because the success stories of Apple’s gadgets, which typically all provide a great user experience to huge audience, go back on agile processes to some extent as well. Usability professionals therefore should discuss about the chances of combining agile and usability/user experience know-how to provide customers with great software products developed in time and budget, as well as equipped with emotionally and aesthetically pleasing user interfaces. This actually goes beyond usability engineering and it is a new and challenging of activity.