Models for Integrating UX into Software Engineering Practice: an Industrial Validation

The user's overall experience and perception of functionalities and qualities of a product, User eXperience (UX), is becoming increasingly important for success of software products. Yet, many software companies face challenges with their UX practices, hence fail to achieve a good UX in their products. Part of these challenges are rooted in inadequate knowledge and awareness about UX but also in that UX models are commonly not well integrated with existing software engineering (SE) models and concepts. Therefore, we present two SE-specific models of UX for practitioners: (i) a layered model that shows the relation between functional, quality, and UX requirements, and (ii) a general, UX-aware software process overview model that shows the additional concepts and activities that can help achieve a good UX. Validation of the models in interviews with 12 practitioners and researchers generally found the models useful for practice; for instance to raise knowledge and awareness about UX, improve communications regarding UX and facilitating making UX-aware decisions in the development process. In total, we identified six different areas of use for the models.