Connecting Agile UX with Agile Software Engineering
By Rex Hartson   |   Second Edition 2019   |   Complete UX Process, UX Guidelines

Imbue an understanding of what a good user experience is and how to achieve it.

Our main goal for this book is simple: to help readers learn to recognize, understand, and design for a quality user experience (UX). Sometimes, a quality user experience is like an electric light: when it works, nobody notices. Sometimes, a user experience is really good and is noticed and even appreciated, and it leaves pleasant memories. Or sometimes, the effects of a bad user experience persist in the user’s mind. So, early in the book, we talk about what constitutes a positive user experience.

Emphasize design

There are many reasons why you may be reading this book, including: What is less obvious than understanding a quality user experience is how to design for it. Perhaps the most significant change in this edition is that we stress design—a kind of design that highlights the designer’s creative skills and insights and embodies a synthesis of technology with aesthetics and meaningfulness to the user. In Part 3, we show you a variety of design methods to help you get just the right approach for your project. Give a how-to approach. We have designed much of the book as a how-to-do-it handbook and field guide, as a textbook for students aspiring to be UX professionals and for professionals aspiring to be better. The approach is practical, not formal or theoretical. Some references are made to the related science, but they are usually to provide context for the practice and are not necessarily elaborated.

UX Experience is more than Usability

As our discipline has evolved and matured, more and more technology companies are embracing the principles of usability engineering, investing in sophisticated usability labs and personnel to “do usability.” As these efforts are becoming effective at ensuring a certain level of usability in the products (thereby, leveling the field on that front), new factors have emerged to distinguish competing product designs. We will see that, in addition to traditional usability attributes, user experience entails social and cultural, value-sensitive design, and emotional impact—how the interaction experience includes “joy of use,” fun, aesthetics, and meaningfulness in the lives of users.

From an Engineering Orientation to a Design Orientation

For a long time, the focus in HCI practice was on engineering, taking its cues from usability engineering and human factors engineering. Our first edition mostly reflected this approach. In this new edition, we are moving away somewhat from an engineering focus to more of a design focus. In an engineering-centric view, we started with constraints and tried to design something to fit those constraints. Now, in a design-centric view, we envision an ideal experience and then try to push the technology limits to make it happen and realize the vision.

The study of usability, a key component of a quality user experience, is still an essential part of the broad and multidisciplinary field of human-computer interaction. It is about getting our users past the technology and focusing on getting things done. In other words, it is about designing the technology as an extension of human capabilities to accomplish something, and to be as transparent as possible in the process.

Karmen Guevara, human–computer interaction pioneer