Agile UX: Unifying design and engineering for optimal product development workflows

Abstract

Digital products, ranging from mobile to desktop applications, from platforms to websites, have become extremely prominent in our everyday life. Their role in tackling real-life challenges is huge, and their place in the modern industry is central. Actually, the rise of digital products is only at its outset, and will be exponential in the next coming years and decades. In the conceptualization and developement of digital products come two major disciplines, among others, into play; UX design and software engineering. In order to deliver great quality products, addressing people’s needs, fulfilling businesses’ objectives, while providing users with a delightful overall experience, optimal work and collaboration between UX designers and software engineers need to happen in the background. Nonetheless, issues and challenges between the design and engineering ways of working are many, regardless of the context. Agile UX, a modern and rising approach to product development, is seen as a potential solution to alleviate these challenges. In a nutshell, Agile UX aims at unifying Agiles software development (ASD), the dominant software engineering approach and philosophy, and UX design (UX) processes and practices, in order to optimise workflows between designers and developers.

This thesis reveals exisiting gaps with the Agile UX approach and current Agile UX frameworks, preventing them to truly be actionable in the industry, and therefore to be a practical solution for reconciling design and engineering in product development. These gaps are adressed here through an empirical study looking at understanding the wide array of contexts of the industry and their specificities.

This thesis research is a two phases study of the Agile UX modern approach to digital product development. The first phase assembles extensive literature and Web content reviews in order to investigate and map the challenges between design and engineering, and understanding to what extent is Agile UX a solution to alleviating those challenges. The main findings of this first phase highlight the aforementioned gaps of the Agile UX approach. Agile UX is indeed a solution to reconciling UX design and software enginnering, but it lacks of clear guidelines and attention to contextuality, preventing it to be trully actionable. Agile UX as it is defined today also has very little considerations on the evolution of the UX design and software engineering disciplines, and fails at anticipating the future of digital products.

Based on these insights, the second phase of the thesis brings up qualitative insights from industry practitioners, including UX designers, software engineers, managers and leaders, in order to address the limitations of the Agile UX approach. This second phase encapsulates the main objective of this thesis; understanding how to contextually adopt an Agile UX approach to product development.

The findings of this thesis highlight the diversity of the industry and the uniqueness of each product development context. The design-engineering relationship varies a lot across organisations, and many contextual facets impact on the ways processes and collaboration practices are defined. Common trends have been highlighted, as well as numerous divergence points. Clear signs show that Agile UX is spreading in the industry already, but quite inequally. At the same time, Agile UX seems to align with the future trends of product development. In addition to the extensive findings, this research concludes with the draft proposition of a methodology. This could be the first building step towards a more developed solution, aiming at supporting teams wishing to optimising their product development workflows, throught Agile UX.