**2. Literature review**

The agile software development approach and the UX approach might appear to be conflicting, *a priori*, since they present two distinct ways of allocating resources within a project [16]. The two approaches are founded on different premises. The agile approach focuses on product development, while the UX approach stresses upon the harmonious integration of the object into the user's life—including the emotional engagement, hedonic appreciation, the values associated to the object, and the technological ecosystem in which the object is used [17]. Proposed iterations on well-defined functional sections of the project may not necessarily provide the same division of test units within the project [18]. The synchronization of activities and practices becomes complex. Indeed, the agile approach proposes a division of the project into working sets to be tested in interaction with the user to ensure their functionality. The UX approach, for its part, proposes a division of the project into needs of the user to be tested to ensure the quality of the specific and global experience of the user. Since there exists such a gap in achievement objectives of both these approaches, their integration will require good communication between all the stakeholders of the project as well as fine-tuning from the early stages of the project.

The agile approach thus provides a development structure to rapidly create products that fulfill the user's needs, while the UX approach provides the target user with a level of empathy, an element is lacking in the agile approach. In other words, on the one hand, the agile approach allows developers to create products that have value for the user: "Agile development lifecycle is characterized as a series of incremental mini-releases. Each mini-release, with a subset of the features for the whole release, has its own requirements analysis, design, implementation, and

## *Towards Agility and Speed in Enriched UX Evaluation Projects DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.89762*

we know from experience that analyzing such measures is time-consuming and complex; hence, they may not always be available promptly to inform product development [7, 8]. As a result, organizations find themselves in a methodological impasse: "There is no time to do thorough usability tests with users between iterations or release cycles, and only testing paper prototypes and doing expert analyses do not provide an accurate picture of the product's usability" [9]. They are thus expected to synchronize their production at a faster pace by adopting a rapid and efficient cycle of development while understanding the different aspects of the

It is, therefore, important to understand how to facilitate UX-enriched data collection and deployment by integrating an agile approach; a topic of growing interest that has been repeatedly projected in prior research presenting psychophysiological measures [10–12]. These implicit measures are less sensitive to social desirability and retrospective biases than explicit measures (e.g., self-reported questionnaires). Thus, the triangulation of explicit and implicit measures offers many advantages, such as providing richer and fewer biases in UX measures. This triangulation approach provides clarity on the participants' lived and perceived

This chapter investigates how these enriched measures can inform user experience evaluation while maintaining agility and speed in UX evaluation projects. Using a multiple case approach, we analyzed 12 recent usability testing projects in which enriched measures were used. It outlines the lessons learned with regard to challenges encountered, the advantages and limitations of using psychophysiological measures in UX evaluation, and the benefits for UX project management

The agile software development approach and the UX approach might appear to be conflicting, *a priori*, since they present two distinct ways of allocating resources within a project [16]. The two approaches are founded on different premises. The agile approach focuses on product development, while the UX approach stresses upon the harmonious integration of the object into the user's life—including the emotional engagement, hedonic appreciation, the values associated to the object, and the technological ecosystem in which the object is used [17]. Proposed iterations on well-defined functional sections of the project may not necessarily provide the same division of test units within the project [18]. The synchronization of activities and practices becomes complex. Indeed, the agile approach proposes a division of the project into working sets to be tested in interaction with the user to ensure their functionality. The UX approach, for its part, proposes a division of the project into needs of the user to be tested to ensure the quality of the specific and global experience of the user. Since there exists such a gap in achievement objectives of both these approaches, their integration will require good communication between all the stakeholders of the project as well as fine-tuning from the early stages of

The agile approach thus provides a development structure to rapidly create products that fulfill the user's needs, while the UX approach provides the target user with a level of empathy, an element is lacking in the agile approach. In other words, on the one hand, the agile approach allows developers to create products that have value for the user: "Agile development lifecycle is characterized as a series of incremental mini-releases. Each mini-release, with a subset of the features for the whole release, has its own requirements analysis, design, implementation, and

user's cognitive and emotional interaction.

*Human 4.0 - From Biology to Cybernetic*

experiences [13–15].

**2. Literature review**

practice.

the project.

**84**

quality assurance phases, and is called a working version" [19]. On the other hand, the UX approach leads development teams to create products that are integrated harmoniously into the user's life and are adapted to them [20].

Nevertheless, both these approaches remain complementary: "Agile projects are highly feedback-driven, yet product teams often rely on user opinion in situations where observation is more appropriate (such as the focus group elicitation strategy described earlier)" [19]. Consequently, the UX approach can greatly improve the agile approach by providing a systematic and scientific way of assessing the needs of target users [18]. Yet, the integration of one approach within the other is complex since, within the UX practice, there are various types of measures implicating different time constrains. On the one hand, there are the neurophysiological data. The preparation needed to collect this kind of data is arduous but, with a strong methodology, can be analyzed rapidly. On the other hand, there is the perceptual data. This data are mainly collected through interviews and need a lot of time to analyze and assess. Finally, there is a promising avenue towards putting forward enriched UX measures implicating both of those data types [21].

There is a gap in the literature and a need to answer this crucial question: Can enriched UX measures be performed quickly enough to be include in an agile development? Two literature reviews on the subject [16, 18] present interesting conclusions and avenues of reflection. One of the main trends seems to be to promote a specialist approach through which the UX work within an agile team is carried out by a specialized designer researcher [22]. Collaboration and communication are also recurring themes in Agile/UX literature. Communication is highlighted not only by the application of the "scrum" model but also by the use of visual artifacts: "We find that both sketches and design stories have critical roles, that these artefacts support creation and reflection, facilitate resolution of contradiction, and also work at a level of consciousness that is below the level of selfawareness" [23]. In addition, to facilitate the integration of experiential results into UX within a development based primarily on product functionality, the Little Design Up Front (LDUF) practice is the most widely adopted initiative in Agile/UX [16]. "LDUF reduces—but does not eliminate—the large amount of design work done through [User-Centered Design] at the beginning of the project so that more effort can be spent on functionality" [18]. This practice is also enriched by the Sprint 0 (i.e., initial sprint), a Sprint process whereby initial user research is done so that all stakeholders can jointly create a basic skeleton and ensure that all future Sprints add incremental real value to the project.

UX designers also often have to simultaneously perform multiple roles involving numerous tasks such as user research, market research, user-centered design, prototyping, usability inspection, user testing, visual design, feedback, and coding [18]. Consequently, they are usually in different working groups, if not in several departments, or even different subcontracted organizations; this evidently complicates coordination and communication between all stakeholders. Moreover, UX researchers find themselves in a unique situation where they have to learn not only to adapt to a new culture and work environment but also to become quickly familiar with the project that has been granted to them. Often, a project may have already been initiated and it may even be in a phase of advanced development, thereby requiring UX researchers to work rapidly to take it forward. While immersed in an agile approach, UX researchers find themselves working on smaller sections of the project simultaneously instead of considering the whole project, which additionally tends to change fast.

With the purpose of integrating an agile approach into an UX research methodology, we must clearly define the objectives to be achieved and ensure that the expectations of all stakeholders are realistic and well defined from the outset of the project. Especially, since "Once there is an established relationship with the client, and the team is familiar with both how they work together and with outside resources, they can better assess the consultant's ability to work with them in an agile setting" [24].

participants, recruitment process, and testing time which, for most of the projects, has been standardized to 12 participants and 1 h of testing). Finally, the degree of details in the test results has been presented in terms of the magnitude of the final

Data were collected using structured interviews with at least three members of each project. The structured interview covered the following properties for each project: (i) objective of the usability test; (ii) difficulty of the objective (1—easy to 5—difficult); (iii) description of the experimental design; (iv) maturity of the stimuli (prototype); (v) tools used and measures analyzed in the test; (vi) time to

The interviews also included open-ended questions focused on project management practices. Questions covered project planning, project management, communication and coordination in the team, status of work with the external client,

The 12 projects involved in this study are descripted in **Table 2**. In total, these projects necessitated the participation of 144 typical users (experts and neophytes), deployed 4 neurophysiological tools and 4 psychometric tools, and concluded with 799 pages of reports. It should be noted that the organization conducted regular debriefing sessions with the client to outline the failures and accomplishments. We can observe that over time, the projects experienced a significant reduction in execution time, human intervention, level of difficulty, and costs by standardizing the methodology. We went from a 19-day project to a 12-day project (including preparation time), from a 20 expert (internal staff and external sponsors) implication to a core team of only 4 experts, and from a level of difficulty of 5–2.5, which all

Based on the interviews and the observation, it has been possible to put forward the following conclusions. To execute a Sprint projects, many considerations have

1.The nature of the research: the nature of the research question impacts the

a. Human: need to communicate regularly with the design clients and various project stakeholders and jointly establish the mandate and

b. Technical: need to anticipate the collected measurements and enhanced

3.The nature of the results: need to adapt the manner of presenting the results in order to underline the operational side without reducing the quality of the

experimental design with the concerned design clients.

results using a mosaic of hybrid collection methods.

completion time and the complexity of the project.

execute the test; (vii) difficulty of the execution (1—easy to 5—difficult); (viii) number of participants; (ix) population; (x) testing time (in minutes); and (xi) magnitude of the report (in pages). To evaluate the difficulty measures, we averaged the answer of the respondents. **Table 1** provides a summary description of

all 12 projects that are presented in chronological order.

*Towards Agility and Speed in Enriched UX Evaluation Projects*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.89762*

project execution, and analysis management.

ultimately affect the cost of operations.

2.The nature of the elements:

to be taken into account:

work performed.

**87**

report submitted (**Table 1**).

**4. Result**

The integration of the two approaches into a common methodology is based on two main strategies [25]: the first suggests that the UX team should become quickly integrated into the product development cycle so that it can understand the initial mission of the project and be present from the first decisions taken, and the second strategy suggests the use and deployment of "agile" tools to facilitate communication and documentation. These are mainly personas, usage scenarios, sketches, and concept maps to quickly understand the direction of the project as well as to facilitate message transmission to all the stakeholders of the project [23].

Regarding the importance of collaboration among the various stakeholders involved in the project, it is essential for all members to maintain constant communication and a working synergy to ensure the sharing of a common mission and vision. In addition, integrating targeted users at key points in the development process allows creators to respond appropriately to their needs. This way of working makes it possible to ensure a certain consistency and uniformity of the project as well as to more effectively control the expectations of the client. "In an ideal situation, UX development and research involves frequent, iterative user testing. Because agile focuses on smaller changes, it can be possible to conduct small-scale testing at various points throughout the process to ensure changes fit with UX expectations" [24]. These different parts of the project can also take the form of "Sprints" of the "development, testing, evaluation, and adjustment" cycle.

By adopting an agile approach, UX researchers tend to change their work methodology by reducing their activities, adopting a less formal process, and a more minimalist method [24]. Although the integration of an agile approach requires a restructuring of the UX experimental design, it is necessary to ensure that the integrity and enhanced value of the UX process are maintained, and even enriched with psychophysiological measures. The recent development of a laboratory management and analytics software platform for human-centered research now makes this kind of integrated process possible, which (a) enables accurate triangulation of enriched UX measures, (b) produces results in a timely manner, and (c) helps to generate meaningful recommendations [26].
