Interaction Discovery in Agile UX

The question of how to discover unwanted features of a design can be broken down into a set of closely related questions (Fig 1).

If user research identifies pain points, how relevant a prediction are they for a new or modified system that does not exist yet? Current use may also include important workarounds developed by the users themselves if elements of the system are programmable in some way, raising questions of customisation. If a problem is suspected, evidence might be sought through comparative testing, but how would the alternatives be chosen when some of them are undesirable? Would they be sufficiently different for the suspected effect to be seen in typical use, or would an unusual scenario be needed for differentiation? Is it practical to write a clear test hypothesis when exploring a problem, or would it rely too much on luck and imagination? When considering the resilience of a system, recognition of how you are currently succeeding can be important. Use of modelling and simulation can be useful, but raises questions of how reliable indicators will emerge from those models, and whether representation of the user population is adequate at the start and how its evolution should be managed to track contextual changes. It may be difficult to anticipate the user's navigation of a future system, and any extrapolation of current user stories to identify future issues may have validation problems.

This breakdown has been used as a guide in designing structured interviews to address the question.

Some industries have products independently assessed before delivery and address shortfalls by imposing limitations on how they are used rather than making late changes. The motivating question that underlies our study arises from participation in these evaluations:

Our study is an exploration of what designers do to identify undesirable interactions. The interaction type of interest is directive control, where users issue instructions to the system. The more complex situations that arise in objective control, where a goal is set but the system has a degree of freedom in how it achieves it, will not be considered. Similarly, conversational interactions, as used in chat-bots, and the manipulatory or exploratory interactions used in virtual environments will not be considered.

The idea of interaction discovery as a mindful examination of cooperation assumptions and requirements between users and systems will be developed and informed by the research.

These ideation activities come under additional pressure in development environments based on the rapid introduction of functional increments, making Agile practices of particular interest as both a challenging technical problem and one sufficiently bounded in time to facilitate study. Our primary research questions address the particular challenges of interaction discovery in Agile development:

Users may have concerns about the integrity and use of their data. The related question of interactions that the system operators regard as undesirable might require consideration of commercial, security and availability issues that do not necessarily coincide with these concerns. Where it is necessary to make the distinction, our study will consider only what is desirable from the point of view of the intended user. Interactions that are immediately undesirable at the time of the instruction, and those likely to be undesirable within the timeframe of the overall activity, will both be considered.

One method of encapsulating the behaviour of an identified segment of the user population is to link their behaviour, their needs, and a narrative of use, with a stereotypical user description, or persona. The way the data is presented may affect the choices made, so we have an interest in personas and other ways of understanding user research that designers create for themselves, as a part of an implied choice architecture, and its possible role in interaction discovery:

These questions are embedded in the broader issue of how user centred design is currently practiced in general and in Agile development environments in particular, so addressing our specific issue will also contribute to an understanding of current practice.