The Contemporary Understanding of User Experience in Practice

TL;DR

This paper analyzes current literature and practitioner perspectives to clarify the multi-dimensional and practical understanding of User Experience (UX) in agile software development.

Contribution

It organizes existing UX knowledge and compares academic literature with practitioner views, highlighting focus areas and gaps in understanding.

Findings

Practitioners focus on interaction and design aspects of UX.

Literature emphasizes multi-dimensionality but less on economic perspectives.

Practitioner writings reveal a practical emphasis on interaction over theoretical aspects.

Abstract

User Experience (UX) has been a buzzword in agile literature in recent years. However, often UX remains as a vague concept and it may be hard to understand the very nature of it in the context of agile software development. This paper explores the multifaceted UX literature, emphasizes the multi-dimensional nature of the concept and organizes the current state-of-the-art knowledge. As a starting point to better understand the contemporary meaning of UX assigned by practitioners, we selected four UX blogs and performed an analysis using a framework derived from the literature review. The preliminary results show that the practitioners more often focus on interaction between product and user and view UX from design perspective predominantly. While the economical perspective receives little attention in literature, it is evident in practitioners writings. Our study opens up a promising line of request of the contemporary meaning of UX in practice.