Overcoming Organizational Barriers to the Integration of UX Methods in Software Development: a Case Study

Kervyn de Meerendré, Vincent [UCL] Rukonic, Luka [UCL] Kieffer, Suzanne [UCL]

Despite User Experience (UX)’ increased popularity, the willingness of organizations to integrate it into their processes and UX practitioners still encounter challenges in integrating UX methods. Research in HCI has presented theoretical and pragmatic models. Most of the time, these models lack presenting validation in practice, documentation or support for their use when difficulties appear. Even if difficulties could be expected. In this paper, we present a categorization of organizational barriers extracted from the relevant literature: lack of UX resources, lack of UX literacy, poor use of UX artifacts and communication breakdowns. Then, we propose a 4-step procedure to identify and overcome organizational barriers with a case study describing how this procedure helped us to anticipate and overcome organizational barriers encountered in a project. With a UX Capability/Maturity (UX CM) assessment conducted at the beginning of the project, we were expecting organizational barriers and constant readjustment of our UX strategy. We Communicated about findings and readjustment to stakeholders in order to increase their awareness about problems along the way of the project and we had prepared remediation strategies for the emergence of barriers.