UserX story: Incorporating UX aspects into user stories elaboration

Abstract

In the last decade, many strategies have been employed successfully to incorporate User Experience (UX) practices into agile development in order to increase user satisfaction with the product. In this paper, we present a grammar for stories of interaction called UserX Story, in order to remedy the difficulties encountered by teams to insert UX aspects and usability requirements in the first steps of software conception. An action research approach was applied to carry out the research within the industry, allowing us to work closely with the agile teams. The research cycle was split in three steps. In the first step, we carried out a technical literature survey, aiming to investigate the use of user stories in the agile methodologies, and additionally, an ethnographic study also was carried out in order to understand how the traditional user stories were being developed by product owners. In the second step, we proposed together with both teams - UX and agile - a grammar to UserX Story incorporating two concepts of UX: personas and Nielsen’s heuristics. In the third step, six product owners were invited to implement the UserX Stories in real projects. After that, we interviewed the participants aiming to collect their experiences with the implementation of UserX Stories. Thus, we have found out that most of the agile teams approved the use of the stories incorporating UX aspects.