Interaction Designers on eXtreme Programming Teams: Two Case Studies from the Real World

The interaction designer role is not an acknowledged role on the core eXtreme Programming (XP) team and XP has no explicit process for dealing with interaction design. We interviewed interaction designers and other team members on two real-world XP teams and in this paper we report on how they combined interaction design activities with XP. Initial results show that having interaction designers on the team, resulted in a workflow that differed from the pure XP process in a significant way: up-front design for user interaction, as opposed to up-front code design, was considered necessary. The iterative nature of XP development required that the interaction designers have continual involvement with the development of the product, which inevitably influenced the nature of the relationship between the interaction designers and the developers.