Stakeholder Involvement: A Success Factor for Achieving Better UX Integration

Other conference contribution, 2016

Stakeholder involvement is one of the major success factors in integrating user experience (UX) practices into software development processes and organizations. It is also a necessity for agile software development. However, both software process improvement literature and agile development methodologies lack guidance on the successful involvement of UX stakeholders. Moreover, the specific characteristics of UX are not well addressed in the agile UX literature as most of the related research does not clearly differentiate between UX and usability work. This paper presents a guideline for supporting stakeholder involvement in both UX integration and the everyday work between UX staff, management, and other staff members. In particular, we focus on the special characteristics of UX in relation to usability: UX is dynamic, subjective, holistic, and context-dependent. This guideline gives practical implications for practitioners and can help academics in addressing the special characteristics of UX in agile UX research.