Methods for developing visualizations in a non-designer environment : A case study

Teams consisting of only software developers will occasionally need to develop products that has to be easy to use. User Centered Design (UCD) is one approach to help increase the ease of use of a product and that can be incorporated into the teams’ traditional workflow when needed. The software developer team followed in this thesis had not tried to incorporate UCD into their current workflow when developing such products. So, this thesis looks at how a product designed with an agile/UCD approach differs from a product developed by the software development team’s traditional approach. The two products were designed to solve the same problem. The results show that the product developed with an agile/UCD-approach gave better usability rankings and better external appeal than the one created with the team’s traditional approach. On the other hand, traditional methods constitute a better choice for quick development of products for more technical user groups within the company for example. INTRODUCTION This thesis has been written at Ericsson AB in Linköping. A cross functional team consisting of software developers who develop machine learning algorithms for radio networks was followed for this thesis. This team spends most of its time developing and improving machine learning algorithms and analyzing the performance of these. The work within the team is conducted using an agile method. A lot of the work that this team does is software development as a part of a bigger product. Occasionally the team faces a situation where they must create internal solutions that demand usability of a certain level. In these cases, an adaption in method is seldom made as usability and design are not part of the team’s standard development procedure. When the solution’s value is dependent on usability and design then using the team’s traditional method might make the solution’s value suffer. Traditionally these cases are handled in the same approach as other tasks within a sprint. The task is delegated to 1 Radio networks are networks of radio towers, base stations members of the software development team who will develop a solution to the best of their ability. Since the team has its focus on products that do not require an extensive usability it is not feasible to recruit a user experience (UX) designer. It is an extra cost for the team and a designer might not fit in with the rest of the team’s workflow. Therefore, it is of interest to see what the effects of incorporating approaches of User Centered Design (UCD) into the work of the current team are. This would let members of the team take on the designer role in a UCD approach. Which leads to the following research question. RQ: What is the difference in measured usability of a visualization of data built in the teams’ traditional software development manner compared to a visualization built in a combined agile/UCD approach? The team that was followed needed a new tool to analyze a specific type of data set. The analytical tools they had at the time were used to create basic visualizations and were developed using their traditional approach. Therefore, the developed product for this thesis will be an analytical tool for creating visualizations and will be developed using a UCDapproach. An introduction to the specific data set used can be found in Background.