Critical Success Factors for Implementing Empathic De-sign in Agile Teams

Agile software teams focus on achieving a working product as fast as possible. This, however, is often accomplished to the detriment of user-centered design principles. Although several tools have been developed that enable agile teams to implement empathic designs in their projects, literature indicates that user experience designers struggle to influence software development teams, while developers find it challenging to collaborate with designers and remain-ing agile. This study serves to identify critical success factors (CSF) for the im-plementation of empathic design in agile software development teams. An in-terpretive case study was performed on an agile software development team to identify these CSF for implementing empathic design. This study found that client buy in, and the implementation of a hybrid agile method are important to the success of implementing empathic design.