DIS 2002: Xtreme Programming makes Good Partner to User-Centred Design

Extreme Programming methods have been seen as a system for producing design prototypes that is incompatible with the methods of user-centred design. However, a team from Xerox PARC showed the audience at the Designing Interactive Systems 2002 conference that XP and UCD can be complementary. Telling the story of two design processes for embedding information management into email, researchers Victoria Bellotti, Nicholas Ducheneaut, Mark Howard and Ian Smith of Xerox PARC and Christine Neuwirth of Carnegie Mellon University compared the outcomes, concluding their first model was unsuccessful even 'with a user-centred approach, largely because fieldwork inspired engineering repeatedly led to innovations that delivered no significant end-user advantages over what was already supported' by available systems.

They defined user-centred methods in this context as 'including fieldwork to uncover target user practices and requirements, scenarios of use and grounded brainstorms to explore design ideas, rough look-and-feel prototypes to walk through usability and informal user evaluations of design ideas'.

But, for their second exploration, the team 'adopted XP as an approach to keep design closely tied to fieldwork findings and usage experience, with fieldworkers playing the part of customer representatives'. This approach, they conclude, was far more successful, giving a usable prototype in a fraction of the time of the first.

Among the benefits they cite is the mechanism it gives for feature prioritisation. Ideas are written up as stories on individual cards and then, at each iteration of development, all stories are considered but only those which are viewed as important are selected for implementation. This passes the responsibility for deciding how to use resources to the fieldworkers (as stand-in customers): relieving engineers of the expectation management that they had had to undertake in the first project. With XP, engineering did what it said on the card, handing back problems and strategy decisions. 'An understanding of the limits of what can be accomplished is far better distributed amongst the stakeholders,' the team reported.

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