State of the art of Agile User Experience: Challenges and solution approaches

Context:

In agile environments with pressure due to changing requirements, it is necessary to incorporate user needs into product development to ensure product success. Accordingly, User Experience (UX) methods should be integrated into the agile environment. The nature of the disciplines Agile and UX shows similarities that form a reasonable basis for this, like avoiding false expectations using continuous reviews and reducing late changes and associated costs.

Objective:

Nevertheless, challenges hinder the integration of the disciplines in practice. To support researchers and practitioners, we provide an overview of the development of the Agile UX research field to detect research gaps. Challenges and solution approaches are identified to provide concrete assistance in the integration of Agile and UX.

Methods:

Based on a tertiary review of 30 related work papers, the evolution of the research field and gaps are identified. Then, a secondary systematic literature review of 86 papers is used to examine challenges and solution approaches to the integration of Agile and UX to make recommendations for action.

Results:

28 challenges (e.g., “Interdisciplinary Knowledge”) and 103 solution approaches (e.g., “UserX Stories”) were identified, whereby one challenge can have several solution approaches and vice versa. Furthermore, all challenges were still addressed in recent years (2020-2023) and cannot be considered solved.

Conclusion:

With our results, practitioners can identify solution approaches that may be relevant for internal company challenges and make use of synergies. The numbers of mentions also provide an overview of the research field, which researchers can use to develop further solution approaches and close research gaps.