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Agile Interaction Design

This is a completed project.

Description

Agile approaches help teams to create and maintain useful software. Usability is a different issue and some research indicates that agile teams, as well as more traditional software engineering teams, are not handling it well. Our Agile Interaction Design focus istrying to overcome this issue by integrating agile methods with ideas from interaction design and usability engineering. The goal is to develop methods, techniques and tools that help cross-functional agile teams to produce not only useful but also usable software.

The results of an early study on how usability specialists work as part of agile teams was published in UCD in Agile Projects: Dream Team or Odd Couple. Currently, we are expanding on this early study by interviewing practitioners about their experiences on agile interaction design.

On the tool front, we are investigating tool support for low-fi prototyping and discount usability testing for supporting release and iteration planning. ActiveStory is a tool that enables prototyping user interfaces and conducting usability tests for agile teams. Please go to the ActiveStory Enhanced page for more information.