Lesson08

Interaction Design in Practice

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1. Introduction
As our interviewee at the end of Chapter 1, Harry Brignull,
remarked, the field of interaction design changes rapidly. He
says, “A good interaction designer has skills that work like
expanding foam.” In other words, the practice of interaction
design is quite messy, and keeping up with new techniques and
developments is a constant goal. When placed within the wider
world of commerce and business, interaction designers face a
range of pressures, including restricted time and limited
resources, and they need to work with people in a wide range of
other roles, as well as stakeholders. In addition, the principles,
techniques, and approaches introduced in other chapters of this
book need to be translated into practice, that is, into real
situations with sets of real users, and this creates its own
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pressures
Many different names may be given to a practitioner
conducting interaction design activities, including interface
designer, information architect, experience designer,
usability engineer, and user experience designer. In this
chapter, we refer to user experience designer and user
experience design because these are most commonly found
in industry to describe someone who performs the range of
interaction design tasks such as interface design, user
evaluations, information architecture design, visual design,
persona development, and prototyping.

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Other chapters of this book may have given the impression
that designers create their designs from scratch, with little
or no help from anyone except users and immediate
colleagues, but in practice, user experience (UX) designers
draw on a range of support. Four main areas of support that
impact the job of UX designers are described in this chapter.
Working with software and product development teams operating an
agile model of development has led to technique and process
adaptation, resulting in agileUX approaches.

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• Reusing existing designs and concepts is valuable and time-
saving. Interaction design and UX design patterns provide the
blueprint for successful designs, utilizing previous work and
saving time by avoiding “reinventing the wheel.”
• Reusable components—from screen widgets and source code
libraries to full systems, and from motors and sensors to
complete robots—can be modified and integrated to generate
prototypes or full products. Design patterns embody an
interaction idea, but reusable components provide implemented
chunks of code or widgets.
• There is a wide range of tools and development environments
available to support designers in developing visual designs,
wireframes, interface sketches, interactive prototypes, and more
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2. AgileUX
Since the rise of agile software development during the
2000s, UX designers have been concerned about the impact
that it will have on their own work (Sharp et al., 2006), and
the debate is ongoing (McInerney, 2017). AgileUX is the
collective label given to efforts that aim to resolve these
concerns by integrating techniques and processes from
interaction design and those from agile methods. While agile
software development and UX design have some
characteristics in common such as iteration, a focus on
measurable completion criteria, and user involvement,
agileUX requires a reorganization and some rethinking of UX
design activities and products.
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A recent reflection on the evolution of agileUX concluded
that integrating agile and UX requires mutual team
understanding across three dimensions, and those
dimensions are variably understood (Da Silva et al., 2018):
the “process and practice” dimension is understood; the
“people and social” dimension is nearly understood; but the
“technology and artifact” dimension—that is, use of
technology to coordinate teams’ activities and artifacts to
mediate teams’ communication—has yet to be properly
understood. A key aspect is for agile development teams to
understand that user experience design is not a role but is a
discipline and mind-set. This account makes it clear that
using agileUX in practice is far from straightforward. The key
is to find a suitable balance that preserves both the research
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needed for good UX design, as well as rapid iterations that
incorporate user feedback and allow technical alternatives to
be tested. In a plan-driven (waterfall) software development
process, requirements are specified as completely as
possible before any implementation begins. In an agile
software development process, requirements are specified
only in enough detail for implementation to begin.
Requirements are then elaborated as implementation
proceeds, according to a set of priorities that change on a
regular basis in response to changing business needs.

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To integrate UX design into an agile workflow, it also needs
to progress in a similar fashion. Reprioritization may happen
as frequently as every two weeks, at the beginning of each
iterative cycle. The shift from developing complete
requirements up front to “just-in-time” or just enough
requirements aims to reduce wasted effort, but it means that
UX designers (along with their software engineer colleagues)
have had to rethink their approach. All of the techniques and
principles that UX designers use are just as relevant, but
how much of each activity needs to be completed at what
point in the iterative cycle and how the results of those
activities feed into implementation need to be adjusted in an
agile development context.
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This can be unsettling for designers, as the design artifacts
are their main deliverable and hence may be viewed as
finished, whereas for agile software engineers, they are
consumables and will need to change as implementation
progresses and requirements become elaborated.
Consider the group travel organizer example introduced in
Chapter 11, and assume that it is being developed using
agileUX. Four epics (large user stories) for the product are
identified in Chapter 11, as follows:

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At the beginning of the project, these epics will be prioritized,
and the central goal of the product (to identify potential
vacations) will be the top priority. This will then initially be the
focus of development activities. To allow users to choose a
vacation, epic 4, supporting the travel agent to update travel
details, will also need to be implemented (otherwise travel
details will be out of date), so this is also likely to be prioritized.
Establishing the detailed requirements and the design of the
other two areas will be postponed until after a product that
allows users to choose a vacation has been delivered. Indeed,
once this product is delivered, the customer may decide that
offering help for vaccinations and visas does not result in
sufficient business value for it to be included at all. In this case,
referring users to other, more authoritative sources of
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information may be preferable
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Conducting UX activities within an agile framework requires
a flexible point of view that focuses more on the end product
as the deliverable than on the design artifacts as
deliverables. It also requires cross-functional teams where
specialists from a range of disciplines, including UX design
and engineering, work closely together to evolve an
understanding of both the users and their context, as well as
the technical capabilities and practicalities of the
technology. In particular, agileUX requires attention to three
practices, each of which is elaborated in the following
sections

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• What user research to conduct, how much, and when
• How to align UX design and agile working practices
• What documentation to produce, how much, and when

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