Abstract In times of crises, such as the refugee crisis or the corona pandemic, the workload in public administrations increases because of the demands of citizens or short-term legal changes. In addition, there is an increasing need for digitalization or to be able to react flexibly to changes. Agile process models and agile practices are appropriate to overcome these challenges. The objective of this paper is to investigate how public administrations can measure their degree of agility to identify potential for improving it. The authors conducted a descriptive single-case study which included multiple units of analysis in a public administration in Germany. The case study was supported by their questionnaire for measuring the degree of agility. One outcome of this study is a conceptual framework that can be used to drive agile transformation in public administrations by continuously measuring agility. Therefore, a questionnaire for measuring agility at team level in public administrations has been developed. The application of the questionnaire in three teams provide insights into dysfunctionality in the interdisciplinary teams as well as optimization potential in terms of affinity to change. The adoption of agility in public administration is a challenge, given that resistance to change is still prevalent. A transformational change is a constant journey, and therefore, the measurement of progress plays an important role in the continuous improvement of an organization. The applied approach delivers high potential for improvement in terms of agility and provides interesting insights for both practitioners and academics.

As collaborative technologies become integral in both professional and leisurely settings, especially during the rise of remote work and digital communities due to COVID-19, understanding the user experience (UX) factors is critical. This study aims to explore the differential importance of these UX factors across professional and leisure contexts, leveraging the widespread use of collaboration tools for an in-depth analysis. The objective of the study is to identify and assess key UX factors in collaboration tools, and to quantify their differential impact in professional and leisure settings. Our research underscores the nuanced role of context in evaluating User Experience (UX) factors’ importance in collaboration tools, with significant variances observed across professional and leisure settings. While some UX factors, including accessibility, clarity, and intuitive use, maintained universal importance across contexts and tools, others—specifically dependability and efficiency—contradicted assumptions of being universal" hygiene factors", demonstrating the complexity of UX evaluations. This complexity necessitates a differentiated approach for each context and collaboration tool type, challenging the possibility of a singular evaluation or statement.

As digital technologies advance, user experience (UX) has become crucial for software and services success. The User Experience Questionnaire Plus (UEQ+) is a flexible tool used to evaluate UX through questionnaires tailored to specific problems, yet a critical factor often overlooked is Trust. Trust, understood as a user’s belief in a software’s ability to function consistently, securely, and with respect for user data privacy, is especially pivotal in areas like financial services, health informatics, and e-commerce platforms. This paper focuses on the construction and validation of Trust as a new factor in the UEQ+. During the construction phase, an initial collection of potential items was assembled for the trust factor. A subsequent study involving 405 participants facilitated the reduction of these items to four, a task accomplished via factor analysis. The proceeding stages involved two additional validation phases, enlisting a total of 897 participants, wherein the selected items were subject to validation. The culmination of this process resulted in a newly validated factor, Trust, which is constituted by the following items: insecure-secure, untrustworthy-trustworthy, unreliable-reliable, and non-transparent-transparent.

Measuring user experience is vital for long-term success of interactive products. Questionnaires like the modular extension of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ+) are an established instrument for this purpose. Different item formats are available for these questionnaires, such as the number of response options (most frequent 5- or 7- point Likert scales). But the item format of an UX questionnaire can of course influence the measured results. We investigate in this paper if the change to a one-sided polarity of semantic differential items influences the effort of the participants required to answer these items and on the measured scale scores. Therefore, we conducted 6 studies with 438 collected responses for the well-known products Microsoft PowerPoint, WhatsApp and Google Maps. Each product was evaluated by a sample of participants with the original UEQ and a modified version of the UEQ with one-sided polarity. In the modified version, the positive term of the semantic differ ential was always placed in the right position, while it is placed in half of the items in the positive and the other half in the left position in the original UEQ version. The results showed that the effort to complete the questionnaire (completion time and number of required corrections) was lower for the version with one-sided polarity, but the differences were so small that they are not practically relevant. But the results also showed that the change to a one-sided polarity introduced an answer tendency, which impact the scale scores. Therefore, the results obtained with the two versions of the UEQ cannot directly be compared. Based on this, we can conclude that it is not possible to directly compare the scores of the original UEQ scales with the corresponding scores of UEQ+ scales.

The integration of Agile software development and User Experience (UX) has become a growing field of research, as both approaches play critical roles in building digital products and services. In this special issue on Agile UX, the current state of the field is explored through a combination of systematic literature reviews and qualitative and quantitative studies. The special issue provide an overview of the key trends, challenges, and successes in combining Agile and UX, and highlight the importance of involving stakeholders throughout development. The shift from plan-driven approaches to Agile UX approaches has brought a focus on human values and a better understanding of the importance of considering users’ needs. We present recent advances in research and practice, showing that Agile UX is a continuous journey towards changing user behavior by delivering value.

In order to be able to meaningfully classify the user experience and thus the popularity of products, UX questionnaires such as the UEQ, SUS or UMUX are frequently used in practice to measure the UX. This makes it possible to specifically evaluate the ratings of pragmatic and hedonic UX factors. However, it is conceivable that, in addition to users’ own perceptions, external factors also have an influence on the evaluation of the UX of products. These include, for example, time or duration of use. It can be assumed that users who rate the UX of a product as good also use this product more frequently and vice versa. Such a consideration of influencing factors is particularly interesting for products that have been used frequently in recent years and thus also during the pandemic. For this reason, Netflix, Microsoft PowerPoint, Zoom and BigBlueButton were selected, which cover the range from primarily hedonic to primarily pragmatic quality. These are examined for their UX ratings as we ll as influencing factors.

Particularly in times of crisis, it is apparent that the digital transformation in Germany has not yet progressed far enough. Public administrations are confronted with legally prescribed obligations to implement e-government and digitization projects in the near future. Project work and the involvement of users in the implementation are increasingly coming into focus. The objective of this paper is to identify the challenges in project work in the context of the implementation of e-government and digitalization projects in public administration. This was done by comparing survey results from 2018 and 2021 and analyzing whether agility can make a decisive contribution to eliminating these challenges. Moreover, it was investigated whether user involvement in implementation is already taking place. This study was conducted for the first time in 2018 and again in 2021 using an online survey. The two samples of the questionnaire study (2018 and 2021) show, that public administrations are increasingly coming into contact with agile methods. Furthermore, challenges were identified that limit improved project work in public administrations and that need to be addressed.

Software development companies use Agile methods to develop their products or services efficiently and in a goal-oriented way. But this alone is not enough to satisfy user demands today. It is much more important nowadays that a product or service should offer a great user experience — the user wants to have some positive user experience while interacting with the product or service. An essential requirement is the integration of user experience methods in Agile software development. Based on this, the development of positive user experience must be managed. We understand management in general as a combination of a goal, a strategy, and resources. When applied to UX, user experience management consists of a UX goal, a UX strategy, and UX resources. We have conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to analyse suitable approaches for managing user experience in the context of Agile software development. We have identified 49 relevant studies in this regard. After analysing the studies in detail, we have identified different primary approaches that can be deemed suitable for UX management. Additionally, we have identified several UX methods that are used in combination with the primary approaches. However, we could not identify any approaches that directly address UX management. There is also no general definition or common understanding of UX management. To successfully implement UX management, it is important to know what UX management actually is and how to measure or determine successful UX management.

The integration of Human-Centered Design into agile product development can be challenging. In particular, the application of established user research and UX design methods within short feedback cycles frequently leads to discussions. This article provides an overview of the development and current state of research in Agile UX. In particular, we analyse Lean UX and answer the following questions: How can user research be implemented in agile product development and which best practices can be used to achieve it? For this purpose, we conducted a literature review and analysed how user research in agile product development has progressed in recent years. We discuss an approach that leverages identified best practices for Agile UX by introducing a new model for integrating Lean UX with Scrum to address the needs of the users more strongly in agile product development. We conclude that existing best practices and patterns already aim to adapt established user research methods to the agile framework. Lean UX provides a suitable approach to integrate such user research methods for use in agile product development. This approach has the potential to improve the user experience.

The dynamically growing research area of gamification is loaded with a lack of consensus on definitions, a variety of non-validated frameworks, and few practical insights. Hence, we conducted a literature review to explore current best practices in applying gamification for integration in a practical use case. Instead, we found a narrow focus on theoretical discussions. For a stronger representation of practical research, standards need to be established for transferring gamification concepts to practical application. To fill this research gap, we designed a process and tools for a practical, human-centered, and context-related gamification application. We derived the process and tools from insights of our literature review as well as the realization of a gamification use case on a German online comparison platform. In addition, we incorporated standards such as the Human- Centered Design Process to maintain the established quality level of the field of user experience. In this paper, we present the Human-Centered Gamification Process (HCGP) and provide tools as practical guidance to lower the barrier for researchers and professionals to conduct theoretical and practical gamification projects.

Abstract Context: Twenty years after the publication of the agile manifesto, agility is becoming more and more popular in different contexts. Agile values are changing the way people work together and influence people’s mindset as well as the culture of organizations. Many organizations have understood that continuous improvement is based on measurement. Objective: The objective of this paper is to present how agility can be measured at the team level. For this reason, we will introduce our questionnaire for measuring agility, which is based on the agile values of the manifesto. Method: We developed a questionnaire comprising 36 items that measure the current state of a team’s agility in six dimensions (communicative, change-affine, iterative, self-organized, product-driven and improvement-oriented). This questionnaire has been evaluated with respect to several expert reviews and in a case study. Results: The questionnaire provides a method for measuring the current state of agility, which takes the individual context of the team into account. Furthermore, our research shows, that this technique enables the user to uncover dysfunctionalities in a team. Conclusion: Practitioners and organizations can use our questionnaire to optimize collaboration within their teams in terms of agility. In particular, the value delivery of an organization can be increased by optimizing collaboration at the team level. The development of this questionnaire is a continuous learning process with the aim to develop a standardized questionnaire for measuring agility.

Currently, voice assistants (VAs) are trendy and highly available. The VA adoption rate of internet users differs among European countries and also in the global view. Due to speech intelligibility and privacy concerns, using VAs is challenging. Additionally, user experience (UX) assessment methods and VA improvement possibilities are still missing, but are urgently needed to overcome users’ concerns and increase the adoption rate. Therefore, we conducted an intercultural study of technology-based users from Germany and Spain, expecting that higher improvement potential would outweigh concerns about VAs. We investigated VA use in terms of availability versus actual use, usage patterns, concerns, and improvement proposals. Comparing Germany and Spain, our findings show that nearly the same amount of intensive VA use is found in both technology-based user groups. Despite cultural differences, further results show very similar tendencies, e.g., frequency of use, privacy concerns, and demand for VA improvements.

In recent years, user experience questionnaires have established themselves to measure various aspects of User Experience (UX). In addition to these questionnaires, an evaluation tool is usually offered so that the results of a study can be evaluated in the light of the questionnaire. As a rule, the evaluation consists of preparing the data and comparing it with a benchmark. Often this interpretation of the data is not sufficient as it only evaluates the current User Experience. However, it is desirable to determine exactly where there is a need for action. The User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) is a common and valid questionnaire with an evaluation tool to measure and analyse the User Experience for a product or service. In our article we present an approach that evaluates the results from the User Experience Questionnaire using the importance-performance analysis (IPA). The aim is to create another possibility to interpret the results of the UEQ and to derive recommendations for action from them. In a study with 467 participants, we validated the approach presented with YouTube, WhatsApp, and Facebook. The results show that the IPA provides additional insights from which further recommendations for action can be derived.

User Experience Questionnaire is a common and valid method to measure the User Experience (UX) for a product or service. In recent years, these questionnaires have established themselves to measure various aspects of UX. In addition to the questionnaire, an evaluation tool is usually offered so that the results of a study can be evaluated in the light of the questionnaire. As a rule, the evaluation consists of preparing the data and comparing it with a benchmark. Often this interpretation of the data is not sufficient as it only evaluates the current User Experience. However, it is desirable to determine exactly where there is a need for action. In our article we present an approach that evaluates the results from the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) using the importance-performance analysis (IPA). The aim is to create another possibility to interpret the results of the UEQ and to derive recommendations for action from them. In a first study with 219 participants, we validated the approach presented with YouTube and WhatsApp. The results show that the IPA provides additional insights from which further recommendations for action can be derived.

To enable an interactive product to provide adequate user experience (UX), it is important to ensure the quantitative measurability of this parameter. The User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) is a well-known and popular method for such a UX measurement. One of the key features of this questionnaire is a benchmark that helps to interpret measurement results by a comparison with a large dataset of results obtained for other products. For situations where filling out the entire UEQ is too time-consuming, there is a short version (UEQ-S). However, there is currently no sufficient data available to construct an independent and interpretable benchmark for this short version. This paper examines the efficiency of using a modified version of the existing benchmark of the full UEQ for this purpose. The paper also presents some additional evaluation results concerning the UEQ-S.

In recent years hybrid approaches focusing on user needs by integrating Agile methodologies (e.g. Scrum, Kanban or Extreme Programming) with Human-Centered Design (HCD) have proven to be particularly suitable for the development of Web systems. On the one hand, HCD techniques are used for requirements elicitation and, on the other hand, they can be utilized to elicit navigation relationships in Web projects. Navigation is one of the basic pillars of Web systems and also a fundamental element for the methodologies within the Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) field. This paper presents an approach to model Agile requirements by means of integrating HCD techniques into Agile software development. We contribute to the software development body of knowledge by creating the concept of a Context-based Persona Story (CBPS) and formalizing it through a metamodel. Our approach covers the modelling of users and stakeholders by personas as well as the visualization of the context of use by storyboards. The attributes of the context of use enable us to elicit acceptance criteria for describing the scope of an Agile requirement.

Agile Software Development (ASD) is becoming more popular in all fields of industry. For an agile transformation, organizations need to continuously improve their established approaches to Requirements Engineering (RE) as well as their approaches to software development. This is accompanied by some challenges in terms of agile RE. The main objective of this paper is to identify the most important challenges in agile RE industry has to face today. Therefore, we conducted an iterative expert judgement process with 26 experts in the field of ASD, comprising three complementary rounds. In sum, we identified 20 challenges in three rounds. Six of these challenges are defined as key challenges. Based on the results, we provide options for dealing with those key challenges by means of agile techniques and tools. The results show that the identified challenges are often not limited to ASD, but they rather refer to software development in general. Therefore, we can conclude that organizations still struggle with agile transition and understanding agile values, in particular, in terms of stakeholder and user involvement.

Industrie 4.0 (English translation: Industry 4.0) stands for functional integration, dynamic reorganization, and resource efficiency. Technical advances in control and communication create infrastructures that handle more and more tasks automatically. As a result, the complexity of today's and future technical systems is hidden from the user. These advances, however, come with distinct challenges for user interface design. A central question is: how to empower users to understand, monitor, and control the automated processes of Industrie 4.0? Addressing these design challenges requires a full integration of user-centered design (UCD) processes into the development process. This paper discusses flexible but powerful methods for usability and user experience engineering in the context of Industrie 4.0.

In general, mechanic, electronic and software are developed independently by different design tools for the same mechatronic object (MO). As a consequence, it's difficult to find links between interrelated data which are needed by back-end tools like simulators. Even new concepts based on the idea of mechatronic objects are restricted to particular views of fabrication. Different views generate different descriptions and semantics of MO. This paper proposes to define MO in a holistic manner by the language for the semantic Web, OWL (Ontology Web Language) such that each specific view of holistic mechatronic objects (HMO) can use a common knowledge base. This approach could be compared with the database approach where each application has its own view of the database. Furthermore, HMO concept also supports the plug-and-play philosophy.