A license to kill – Improving UCSD in Agile development

Abstract Agile development processes, such as Scrum, focus on communication, developer collaboration and delivery of working software early and continuously. User-centered systems design (UCSD) is a process emphasizing usability and the user experience throughout the system life cycle. It highlights the UCSD activities: understanding the context of use, iterative prototyping to explore the design space and active collaboration with users throughout the software development. Agile processes are by many assumed to address similar issues as UCSD, hence, by applying Agile processes the systems would become usable for the end-users and their user experience should improve. This paper discusses and interprets findings on UCSD activities in Agile projects in practice, that are analyzed according to the fundamental principles from the Agile manifesto. We show that Agile development has much to gain from integrating UCSD, and give guidance on how to integrate UCSD in Agile processes. User experience (UX) professionals need a more explicit role in the Agile projects and more authority. We recommend that they receive a “license to kill” design suggestions that are not perceived as useful by the users.