User Experience in Software Engineering

Abstract

User eXperience (UX) has gained interest in the software engineering research community in recent years. However, UX practitioners are still facing challenges to define “what is UX?”. Hence, many software companies are challenged to address the communication between users and software engineers. This thesis presents a systematic mapping study to get an overview of how UX has been researched in the field of software engineering and to identify the gaps in the existing literature about UX in software engineering. From the initial set of 29970 studies, 170 primary studies are selected and categorized. The main findings from this mapping study is that 1) the frequency of publications about UX has increased from 2007 and forward, 2) there is a lack of studies about tools and technology, 3) the domains in which we found most studies were about mobile and sales, 4) there is a lack of studies about tools in the business phase of the software development, and 5) most of the studies are about non-agile approaches.