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-