Current State of Agile User-Centered Design: A
Survey ?
Zahid Hussain1, Andreas Holzinger2, and Wolfgang Slany1
1
Institute for Software Technology, Technical University Graz, Austria
zhussain@ist.tugraz.at, slany@ist.tugraz.at
2
Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Documentation,
Medical University Graz, Austria
andreas.holzinger@medunigraz.at
Abstract. Agile software development methods are quite popular nowa-
days and are being adopted at an increasing rate in the industry every
year. However, these methods are still lacking usability awareness in
their development lifecycle, and integration of usability/User-Centered
Design (UCD) into agile methods is not adequately addressed. This pa-
per presents the preliminary results of a recently conducted online survey
regarding the current state of the integration of agile methods and us-
ability/UCD. The survey was responded by 92 practitioners throughout
the world. The results show that the majority of practitioners perceive
that the integration of agile methods with usability/UCD has added
value to their adopted processes and to their teams; has resulted in the
improvement of usability and quality of the product developed; and has
increased the satisfaction of the end-users of the product developed. The
top most used HCI techniques are low-fidelity prototyping, conceptual
designs, observational studies of users, usability expert evaluations, field
studies, personas, rapid iterative testing, and laboratory usability test-
ing.
Keywords: Agile Methods, Extreme Programming, Scrum, Usability,
User-Centered Design, Survey.
1 Introduction
Agile software development methods are quite popular nowadays and are being
adopted at an increasing rate in the industry every year. Recently, Dyba and
Dingsoyr [1] presented a good review on the empirical studies of agile software
development. However, agile methods are still lacking usability awareness in
? The research herein is partially conducted within the competence network Softnet
Austria (www.soft-net.at) and funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economics
(bm:wa), the province of Styria, the Steirische Wirtschaftsfo¨rderungsgesellschaft
mbH. (SFG), and the city of Vienna in terms of the center for innovation and tech-
nology (ZIT).

2 Z. Hussain et al.
their development lifecycle, and integration of usability/User-Centered Design
(UCD) into agile methods is not adequately addressed. Holzinger [2] points out
the need of the awareness of various usability methods by software practitioners
and applying them according to the context of a project.
The efforts of integrating usability/HCI into software engineering have al-
ready been carried out for many years, e.g., IFIP WG 2.7/13.43 working group
has been formed [3]. A recent work is compiled by Seffah et al. [4] in the form
of book containing chapters about various aspects of the integration of usability
into the development process. However being recent and emerging idea of agile
methods, there has not been much work carried out regarding the integration
of usability/UCD into agile methods. The research carried out and presented in
this paper aims at filling out this gap and presents the preliminary results of a
recently conducted online survey regarding the current state of the integration
of agile methods and usability/UCD. The data was collected from 92 practition-
ers throughout the world. The results show that the majority of practitioners
perceive that the integration of agile methods with usability/UCD has added
value to their adopted processes and to their teams; has resulted in the improve-
ment of usability and quality of the product developed; and has increased the
satisfaction of the end-users of the product developed. The top most used HCI
techniques are low-fidelity prototyping, followed by conceptual designs, observa-
tional studies of users, usability expert evaluations, field studies, personas, rapid
iterative testing, and laboratory usability testing, respectively.
The next section thoroughly describes related literature studies. Section 3
describes details about the research method. Section 4 describes the results.
Section 5 concludes the paper with future work.
2 Related Literature Studies
This section presents related work into two sub-sections: Related studies on agile
usability/UCD in general and studies regarding surveys on agile methods and
usability/UCD.
2.1 Related Studies on Agile Usability/UCD
In 2002, Kent Beck and Alan Cooper discussed the integration of XP, one of
the popular agile methods, and interaction design and concluded that both ap-
proaches have strengths that can be integrated [5]. The focus of both method-
ologies on delivering value and on customers/users, as well as their iterative
nature and continuous testing make it possible to integrate them and reduce
the shortcomings of each methodology, as agile methods need to know their true
end-users and UCD benefits from a flexible and adaptive development method-
ology which runs throughout the project life-cycle [6]. Several studies exist that
examine various aspects of the integration of agile methods and usability/UCD.
3 http://www.se-hci.org/