practice
Doi: 10.1145/1866739.1866753
article development led by
queue.acm.org
Talking with Julian Gosper, Jean-Luc Agathos,
Richard Rutter, and Terry Coatta.
acm case stuDY
ux Design
and agile:
a natural fit?
foUND at the intersection of many fields—including
usability, human-computer interaction (HCI), and
interaction design—user experience (UX) design
addresses a software user’s entire experience: from
logging on to navigating, accessing, modifying,
and saving data. Unfortunately, UX design is often
overlooked or treated as a “bolt-on,” available
only to those projects blessed with the extra time
and budget to accommodate it. Careful design of
the user experience, however, can be crucial to the
success of a product. And it’s not just window
dressing: choices made about the user experience
can have a significant impact on a software product’s
underlying architecture, data structures, and
processing algorithms.
To improve our understanding of UX design
and how it fits into the software development process,
we focus here on a project where UX designers
worked closely with software engineers to build
BusinessObjects Polestar (currently marketed as SAP BusinessObjects Explorer), a business intelligence (BI) query
tool designed for casual business users. In the past, such users did not have
their own BI query tools. Instead, they
would pass their business queries on to
analysts and IT people, who would then
use sophisticated BI tools to extract
the relevant information from a data
warehouse. The Polestar team wanted
to leverage a lot of the same back-end
processing as the company’s more sophisticated BI query tools, but the new
software required a simpler, more user-friendly interface with less arcane terminology. Therefore, good UX design
was essential.
To learn about the development process, we spoke with two key members
of the Polestar team: software architect
Jean-Luc Agathos and senior UX designer Julian Gosper. Agathos joined
BusinessObjects’ Paris office in 1999
and stayed with the company through
its acquisition by SAP in 2007. Gosper
started working with the company five
years ago in its Vancouver, B.C., office.
The two began collaborating early in
the project, right after the creation of
a Java prototype incorporating some
of Gosper’s initial UX designs. Because
the key back-end architecture is one
that had been developed earlier by the
Paris software engineering team, Gosper joined the team in Paris to collaborate on efforts to implement Polestar
on top of that architecture.
To lead our discussion, we enlisted a
pair of developers whose skill sets largely mirror those of Agathos and Gosper.
Terry Coatta is a veteran software engineer who is the CTO of Vitrium Systems
in Vancouver, B.C. He also is a member of ACM Queue’s editorial advisory
board. Joining Coatta to offer another
perspective on UX design is Richard
Rutter, a longtime Web designer and a
founder of Clearleft, a UX design firm
based in Brighton, England.
Before diving in to see how the collaboration between Agathos and Gosper played out, it’s useful to be familiar
with a few of the fundamental disci-