With the advancement in science and technology, which enabled the development of innovative goods and services, users have acquired tremendous amount of options before their eyes. The needs of users (who have the right of choice) have become the key f...
With the advancement in science and technology, which enabled the development of innovative goods and services, users have acquired tremendous amount of options before their eyes. The needs of users (who have the right of choice) have become the key factor to consider, thus the competition to be 'the chosen one' is getting more intense, as the service providers try to reflect the users' demand faster than their competitors.
As the traditional way of development process cannot meet the users' demands anymore, or to flexibly respond to changes in external environment, software development process started to change its style to 'agile' development process. However, the agile development process could not respond to all users' needs, thus it was needed to put additional efforts to meet the needs of users, and even their unconscious needs. This results in the rise in demand of a well-made User Experience, which led the providers to combine agile development process with the design process of user experience.
Agile UX Process is the combination of the agile development process and the user experience design process. The providers had conducted various experiments to improve the efficiency of this new process, and they found many failed cases since the agile have the traits of processing all the tasks simultaneously, and also the role and responsibility is ambiguous compared to the former process.
This study put the usability expert as variable, observed if the agile UX process has any differences from the other processes, and conducted an in-depth interview to check the necessity of usability experts, their roles, and their expected roles. The interviewees consist of eight people who are experienced with the agile UX process. Four of them had usability expert when they used the agile UX process, while the other four did not have one. There actually was a difference due to the existence of usability expert, and every interviewee agreed in the necessity of usability expert. However there were some differences in the present role and expected role, and the present role was also slightly different from the role in previous UX design process.
Based on the result of in-depth interview, this study conducted additional survey to check if the result have universality. The interviewees were experienced with the agile UX process, but did not consider if they are working with the usability expert or not. Yet, added a questionnaire to check if the usability expert is participating when the agile UX process is conducted. In result, there were more cases of usability experts participating in the process, but most of them were part-timers. The present role of usability experts is overlapping with the existing role, but they also act as mediators' of different opinions, which is differentiated from the existing role. This work surveyed on the expected roles, suggesting examples based on the key words derived from the in-depth interview. According to the answers from the interviewees, the present usability experts are mostly dealing with the same tasks as the traditional usability experts. Some answered that the usability experts are acting as a mediator, and the others said they are studying the behavioral patterns of users by analyzing Big Data. There were also some changes in expectation towards usability experts, for example, the role as a mediator, or helping the agile UX process go smooth and fast.
Based on these results, it is possible to figure out the required roles of usability experts in the agile UX process, at the same time, to decide whether the usability experts should take parts in the process or not.