Exploring practitioners’ perspective on user experience and agile software development

Integrating user experience (UX) practices into agile software development remains a challenge for many organizations. Understanding the perspectives and experiences of UX and development practitioners is crucial to improving this integration. Although agile methodologies have gained widespread adoption, they often lack explicit guidance on incorporating UX activities and roles. This can lead to problems such as lack of time for UX work, communication gaps between teams, and misalignment between user needs and development priorities. This study presents the findings of six in-depth interviews conducted with practitioners: three UX roles and three agile developer roles. The interviews aimed to collect experiences, identify problems, and gather recommendations for the better integration of UX in agile projects. The interviews covered topics such as the methodologies used, team organization, UX activities, collaboration between roles, and evaluation methods. We identified 9 methods used for UX evaluation, 25 key problems faced when integrating UX into agile environments, and 40 recommendations and practices suggested by practitioners. Major problems include a lack of time for UX work, communication gaps, and difficulty in obtaining feedback from representative users. Notable recommendations involved holding regular meetings between UX and development, involving developers in UX activities, creating UX component guides, and having the UX team work ahead of the development sprints.